I got a free magazine in the mail that says on the cover that “smart appliances” in the home will save the overburdened Dutch power grid. Or we could not authorize that new datacenter on the other side of town that everyone’s protesting, Femke
My lightbulbs are already vastly more power efficient than they were when I was a kid. My screens already turn off after a few minutes of inactivity. My washing machine already takes three hours because it’s more power efficient to do it slowly. It’s four degrees outside and I’m not running the heat because I’m ingeburgerd. I don’t think the average Dutch household is the problem here and if “smart” means “internet connected” my gods, that’s just more problems on purpose
Smart as in easy to force to overheat remotely? Sign me up
@0xabad1dea When I was young, computers were 500W and light bulbs were 100W. Now light bulbs are like 20W and computers are like 40W. I could run for ten hours now to use the same electricity as one hour in the 90s.
Nov 7, 2026, 9:29 AM@spacehobo @0xabad1dea
When I was young my computer used 5 watt.
(Which was at the limit of what the power supply could deliver, so if you as much as bought extra RAM, you had to get a larger power supply).
The CRT monitor, on the other hand...
@0xabad1dea I think we should be a bit smarter about our appliances, but that doesn't necessarily mean connecting them insecurely! https://www.academia.edu/2998-3665/3/3/10.20935/AcadEnergy8514
I also think we should go easy on the datacentres, else we may not be able to (eg) get our grids to Net Zero.
@0xabad1dea I think there are some limited cases where some smartness is valid. Coordinating ev charging, domestic solar and domestic batteries with grid needs probably needs smart connectivity. But no llm ai is needed, some linear regression and bidding should be sufficient. Most of that happens in the suburbs, not the cities though.
@0xabad1dea you don't want a fridge that doubld as a oven?
Nov 7, 2026, 11:10 AMI have had some conversations with folks responsible for this in the UK over the last year or so. I presume the problem is similar in NL. It isn’t total consumption that matters it’s that renewable supplies tend to be bursty. We’ve had several times over the last year when the wholesale price of electricity has been negative because there’s a lot of wind generation and big weather events (especially moderately high wind across the whole country, rather than very high wind) generates more power than the grid can consume, whereas at other times the grid needs to burn gas to meet demand.
There are a few things being done to address this. One is building more storage (and, especially, more distributed) storage. One is upgrading the grid so that oversupply in one region can be shunted elsewhere in larger amounts. The last one is the smart grid.
A lot of high-drain appliances are not that picky about when they run. Fridges, freezers, and domestic heat pumps (all three are some form or heat pump) maintain a reservoir of coolant or hot water and aim to keep something within a temperature range. Having heat pumps run more when there is cheap (or even free) supply, and then need to run less later effectively uses their reservoirs as energy storage. During peak times, having them run at staggered intervals reduces peak demand. Even with heat pumps, domestic heating is one of the largest single sources of energy consumption and the move to heat pumps is moving that from gas to electricity and the gas grid has very different characteristics. The grid operator really wants heat pumps to coordinate their demand.
Something similar applies to tumble dryers, especially washer-dryers where you can often vary the start time for several hours to take advantage of cheap generation. Weather models are now good enough that they can predict the expected generation output with enough accuracy to give a reasonable prediction of the retail price throughout the day, so it’s quite feasible to say ‘I want these clothes washed and dried before I get home, pick a time that’s cheap’.
The thing that keeps NCSC folks up at night is the idea that there’s a remotely exploitable vulnerability in a popular tumble dryer or heat pump. An attacker who can turn on 10,000 of those at once and then turn them all off ten seconds later can probably desynchronise the grid, and then it’s at least a day until most of the country has electricity again (optimistically). This is why a lot of our funding comes from the government: they’d really like to see IoT and Smart Grid things secure before someone decides to break the entire country.
And, yes, ‘AI’ datacentres break all of this and are a nonsense waste of energy.
@david_chisnall wouldn't connecting all appliances to the network make the nightmare scenario more likely to happen? Just adding randomness to the startup/shutdown logic might be more robust, like the recent battery clock synchronization thing.
@0xabad1dea
Nov 7, 2026, 11:25 AMYes, quite probably. The current mitigation is that they don’t actually talk to the Internet. The smart meter runs a local network that can communicate price data. The problem is, once appliance vendors have built a comms stack to talk to that, some marketing person says ‘let’s add an app!’ And then it all starts to go horribly wrong.
@david_chisnall
@0xabad1dea
It might make slightly more sense if they are using PLC for the internal network, I suppose.
Nov 7, 2026, 11:23 AMOnly tangentially related, but the two most terrifying things I have learned about electricity grids over the last decade:
London’s power comes from three distribution points. With one down, everything is fine. With two down, critical services can still run. With three down, the entire city is without electricity. Enough replacement parts are kept to repair one, the lead time for replacements was six months prior to the last six years of supply chain shenanigans, no idea how long it is now, because a lot of critical parts are very low volume and are manufactured on demand.
Italy’s electricity grid uses the telephone network for synchronisation. Minimal service for the phone network requires at least two power plants to be operative and synchronised. There is not (or, at least, was not: I hope there is now!) a process for breaking this circular dependency: if the grid ever goes out completely, there was no plan for restarting it (or, at least, no plan that would work, the plan as written assumed the telephone network was operating).
The Iberian outage a few months ago gave everyone a worked example of how painful it is to restart a grid once a large chunk has become desynchronised. And that wasn’t an active attack.
@david_chisnall @0xabad1dea And its worse than that because the copper telephone network is being decommissioned in many places. Maybe they need to get some shortwave radios with generators set up, and carry out regular exercises with them.
@tokensane @david_chisnall @0xabad1dea This exists, I'm part of it :-) In the UK we have RAYNET groups of volunteers with radio gear and skills who liase with local council resilience forums to provide comms in grid-down situations. Was on call for a week or two a few years back when a local city-scale substation was showing signs of imminent failure, until the replacement part was built+shipped+installed!
@0xabad1dea do you not crave a little spice in your life not knowing when your fridge randomly gets set to 50C ? :)
Is it smart to have a fridge hackers can set to room temperature, and beyond?
DM for conversation
@0xabad1dea but just think of the energy saved when bad actors turn off all the connected fridges 🧐
In the UK we do a lot more time shifting of heavy loads such as clothes drying and car charging to overnight.
Midnight to 05:00h is way less expensive and there is much less load on the grid and generation then 🙂
@simonzerafa haha, Dutch people don't run laundry at night, the neighbors would call the cops
@0xabad1dea Also, things like "smart meters" that promised to "make your power usage more efficient" are actually just showing you more information and making you do more mental work to analyse it. The "smart" part is just outsourcing to the people living in the house.
Nov 7, 2026, 8:05 PMNov 7, 2026, 9:01 AM@0xabad1dea
How can a remote controllable smart fridge help save the power grid? Do they know how much power a fridge uses to heat up to 50 degrees?
Nov 7, 2026, 9:07 AM@0xabad1dea is this manufactured consent
shoved in your mailbox
@0xabad1dea
"Free".
*Somebody* paid for it.
@0xabad1dea Will they save the power grid by not letting you use them when you want?
i like how well they timed this prank with supermarket "smart" fridges being hacked
@0xabad1dea Oh please! Energy saving is for the plebs, you can't expect such a thing from a poor company. Think of the shareholders and loses they can make!
yeah. the data center crap like this is about the same as telling consumers to switch to paper straws while billionaires fly private jets...
i keep feeling like the shills pushing artificial intelligence don't believe the rest of us have real intelligence.