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0 pointspjerem4y ago0 comments

In France, every electric meter have been (or is going to be) replaced with a new one named Linky.

Linky is an electric meter connected to the grid through PLC but it embeds the required hardware to eventually drive appliances consumption.

It provides a dry contact which can be open or closed remotely via the grid’s PLC. So it can be open or closed even without internet.

You can imagine to use this contact to drive a power line dedicated to your water boiler, electric car …

IIRC, atm, the only provided possibility is to open/close the contact via a web API / a smartphone app. But in the future, it may become controllable by the electricity provider to be automatically opened / closed based on the grid’s state (and the electricity price)

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5 comments · 2 top-level

WalterBright4y ago· 2 in thread

> So it can be open or closed even without internet.

A binary solution is far less efficient than one where the consumer decides if he's willing to pay the spot price or not. Especially if that is controlled from afar.

Shaping demand with prices is how free markets work. Shaping demand via some remote bureaucrat's decision to randomly cut people off is socialism.

dgroshev4y ago

Rolling blackouts fit your definition, do you consider Texas socialist? They had remote bureaucrats cutting people off just last winter.

WalterBright4y ago

I don't know the Texas crisis in detail, but I recall that people who were paying variable rates were not cut off.

I call something socialist when government regulators set the price, or otherwise interfere with the price.

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Lichtso4y ago· 1 in thread

That's great! While probably hard to watch anywhere outside of Germany, there is a mini TV series about what will happen when we all got our smart electric meters:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11470588/ https://next-episode.net/blackout-2021 https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/136365-blackout

And before anyone replies that it won't come that far, please consider three things:

- We are using an AC power network, not a DC one.

- The power grid is the backbone of modern society.

- Try to find one big technology deployment which was deemed "safe" and actually kept that promise. Because I can easily find countless counter examples reaching from the Titanic to your latest game console.

pjeremOP4y ago

The dry contact I'm talking about is totally opt-in. It's a physical contact that is not used by default. You can, if you want, wire it to a power line on which you can plug a subset of your appliances.

So the surface attack of this feature is that an hacker could stop you water boiler to heat or your car to charge, but you'd just have to plug them to the rest of your (still working) network.

And yes, the electricity provider could probably switch off your provisioning remotely. But that's not a novelty. That was always possible. Now it can be done safely.

And I'd like to add that the Linky is NOT connected to the internet. It's connected to the electricity provider network so you need to control the electricity provider in order to hack the meter. But at this point, if you gain control of the network, there is no interest in hacking the meters.

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