Not much about the potential severity of hacking something like this: You could probably blow circuit breakers in MV substations with a vulnerability like this if there are enough batteries under control in the same area and you get them to all discharge at max current at the same time. Serious, expensive damage. They could be substations connected to essential services like hospitals (though they’ll have backup gensets).
The energy transition is going to be a fun time for infosec!
> You could probably blow circuit breakers in MV substations with a vulnerability like this if there are enough batteries under control in the same area and you get them to all discharge at max current at the same time. Serious, expensive damage.
AFAIK, all that would happen in this case would be that discharging the batteries would raise the grid voltage, and if it were raised enough, the over-voltage detection on the substation circuit breakers would trip and open these breakers normally. It wouldn't damage the breakers (or anything else at the substation), they're designed to deal with over-voltage events (for instance, when a large block of power consumers suddenly trips offline, the voltage raises until the power plants either throttle down or also trip offline).
The energy transition is going to be a fun time for infosec!