[olliej]

I’m kind of confused, the headline says they’re out of operation, the article says they’re in auto mode.

My understanding (prior to this article) was that turbines normally ran autonomously anyway, so is this “they’re generating power in automatic mode”, or they’ve gone to some kind of automatic safe-mode? (I do know that just turning it off/applying brakes is insufficient for a general “safe” mode, but that’s at “I saw it on tv once” level not any technical knowledge)

[warmwaffles]

I'm also confused as to why there is no communication cable like a fiber optic line to each one of these turbines along with the power cables. Am I missing something?

[olliej]

I'm guessing it's because someone said (reasonably) "we need to be able to manage these turbines if a line is taken out", so they went "ok, lets add radio/satellite or something". The next thing you do is go "we have that connection, why are we paying huge amounts of money on cable for data when we already have a radio?"

[ncmncm]

The article makes clear the turbines are running on "auto mode", out of communication with the manufacturer, and that owners are making arrangements to communicate with their turbines by other means than satellite links.

So, it did not "knock out" the turbines, it only knocked out communication with them. That reasonably upsets Enercon, and maybe Enercon's customers, but appears not to reduce the power output from the turbines, so probably shouldn't worry the rest of us much, if they can re-establish contact without relying on the satellite link, which they should do anyway, and if it does not mean that somebody else can take over control of the turbines.

Knowing how equipment is built these days, it would be not at all surprising if in fact it were easy to crack into these turbines' control channels and make them destroy themselves. That doesn't seem to be what has happened here, yet. But sometimes, forcing somebody to go to a backup control method is a first step in breaking in, if the backup method is more easily cracked into.