alt Hacker NewsCool, I thought grid stability attacks would rely on large numbers of IoT devices but it looks like computing infrastructure is the better target.
Whether it's by buying and using a trillion tokens strategically or by inserting synchronized malicious jobs it should be possible to find some resonant frequencies in the line frequency control system. By loading and unloading multi-megawatts of draw you could get the local supply throttling up and down enough desynchronize from the larger grid. If you could get real time measurements of the line frequency you could use that to tune your malicious load and do the whole 'pushing a kid at the peak of their swing' thing.
To mitigate you would have to put dummy loads or some kind of minute-scale power storage onsite or nearby to compute loads.
Multiple MW is noise level, even to a single moderately sized power production facility, let alone the whole grid region. This is not a viable attack. I can have an entire aluminum smelter trip off or start up and it won't phase my supply, a data center is going to be trivial unless you can spend enough to control all the data centers in which case youve just made the least efficient grid attack in history.
Further, there is no single resonant frequency, only the particular resonance of that exact moment in time. The grid is composed of many generating units, many transmission lines, many transformers. The resonant frequency of the grid is changing moment to moment as those things come online, get loaded partially, go offline, heat up, etc.
This is not a child on a swing set problem.