How well are wind farms protected from cyber attacks? Will ransomware and other attacks potential strike more and more wind energy companies, following the attempted extortion of Invenergy? And, we discuss transmission lines - the electrical engineering needed, AC vs DC power, interstate line projects, Texas and ERCOT's problems, and more.



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Wind Farms At Cybersecurity Risk? Plus, a Deep Dive into Transmission Lines



0:00This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. At Weather Guard, we make lightning protection easy. If your wind turbines are due for maintenance or repairs, install our StrikeTape retrofit LPS upgrade at the same time. A StrikeTape installation is the quick, easy solution that provides a dramatic, long lasting boost to the factory lightning protection system. Forward Thinking wind site owners install StrikeTape today to increase uptime tomorrow, learn more in the show notes of today's podcast.



Welcome back.



0:38I'm Allen Hall.



0:39I'm Dan Blewett. And this is the uptime podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering, lightning protection and ways to keep your wind turbines running.



All right, welcome back to the uptime podcast. This is Episode 66. And in today's episode, we're gonna talk a lot about transmission lines. Obviously, our co host, Allen Hall is an electrical expert, electrical engineer, lightning protection, all that stuff. So be prepared to get real nerdy with us today on electricity. And we're also going to talk a little bit about something that's going to be a big growing concern. It's becoming a growing concern in all industries, which is hacking ransomware struck invenergy does a big developer of wind sites and other renewable energy, they are subject to attack recently. So we'll chat a little bit about that. And then obviously, as we get more and more wind farms online, a growing problem is going to be how do we transmit that power to the grid? And where does it need to go? And do we have enough capacity in the transmission lines to get it there. So that's going to be a big topic for today. But before we get going, I want to remind you again, in the show notes of today's episode, whether you're on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, you'll find a link to subscribe to uptime tech news, which is just our new weekly email sent every Thursday morning, that's going to let you know, hey, we got a new podcast. Here's what it's about. Here's our guest. Here's our topic. Here's a clip from another show. Here's some other great wind energy news, always on the tech side of things just right in your inbox. So if you're already a regular guest on the show, or a listener of the show, thank you. And we think you'll really like our to the point concise, not time waster very upfront email. So sign up for that in the show notes. So Alan, let's start today with invenergy. They were hacked, they discovered the the breach. And this wasn't a typical ransomware where they encrypted all their data, really, it seemed like it was just an extortion attempt on their billionaire founder. And of course, the guy was kind of just like, Hey, here's the middle finger, we're not paying you. And you're not going to extort me. But this is a scary thing. And I'm sure, you know, as our previous guest, Byron Martin from Teknologize, who's a cybersecurity expert and an IT expert, as they mentioned in our podcast, so definitely check out that episode with Byron Martin and Dan Morgan, if you haven't, this is going to become a bigger bigger thing like the colonial pipeline was hit. You know, government agencies are getting hit.