The details come from a joint investigation by public broadcasters in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. It says Russia has a fleet of vessels disguised as fishing trawlers and research vessels in the North Sea. They carry underwater surveillance equipment and are mapping key sites for possible sabotage…
A Danish counter-intelligence officer says the sabotage plans are being prepared in case of a full conflict with the West while the head of Norwegian intelligence told the broadcasters the programme was considered highly important for Russia and controlled directly from Moscow.
It seems unlikely that Russia would target individual windmills, there are going to be thousands of them, perhaps tens of thousands. Much easier would be the distribution nodes where the power is collected and/or massaged into the grid. In the era of a smart bomb, and GPS isolated locations of where the windmills are, why would you go after such small targets when much richer targets exist? And even if you needed to wait until the initial strikes are done (command & control) there’s not risk. It’s not as though the windmills are going to be moving.
I agree. But they probably all connect to underwater cables that go to shore. They are vulnerable and hard to protect. Ditto pipelines bringing oil and natural gas to shore.
And of course they have the coordinates of all power generating plants ready to target (as they have in Ukraine). And probably seaports.
Underwater drones could probably be programmed to do the job at the push of a button.
Drag a heavy anchor over the cables… Amazing the disruption that can cause with no visible damage on the surface. Still no one knows who did Nord Stream in.
The company’s [Mingyang Smart Energy] involvement has also raised the hackles of the Ministry of Defence, with sources suggesting that Chinese turbines, each equipped with hundreds of sensors and floating off the British coast, may pose a security risk.
“If a Chinese company supplies the turbines they have a legitimate excuse to visit at any time for maintenance,” a source told The Sun. “That means they can install almost anything they like.”…
On Wednesday in the Commons, Christine Jardine, Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West, close to Grangemouth, questioned Mingyang’s involvement in the Green Volt scheme. Running turbines and cable systems on Chinese software risks leaving the UK vulnerable to a remote switch-off, she warned.
Wind turbines at sea much like pipelines and cables are virtually in defensible. They depend mostly on an honor system and counter threats to their systems.
In the event of extended war they are gonners. Better have back ups.
Yes, but really really really expensive compared to not having idiot wars.
Humanity is getting short on time, and nothing wastes time, treasure, and devoted lives more than war.
The USA made a huge, expensive, and initially stunningly successful investment in creating a post WWII environment that at least somewhat credibly imagined ever lessening carnage and destruction allowing rapid universal economic expansion and well being.
But, the hope for that vision in some kind of “End of History” relatively automatic process has been brutally broken. However, just because it will require immense hard work on devising and acting on international, national, and local norms, once again attempting to escape endless wasteful egoistic imperial carnage, does not excuse us from that hard work, let alone the thinking deeply, and self-transforming necessary to carry the norms into daily reality.
So, yes, we are falling into an era where windmills are extremely vulnerable, along with humans and those aspects of planet Earth that sustain us, and whisper of paradise.
I think everyone agrees war is a waste of resources. And costs many lives and much damage. Unfortunately some leaders take exception to that idea and invade neighbors. How should other countries respond?
Help the invading country comprehend that this was a bad idea, and see to it that the leader is put before an international tribunal if possible.
If not possible, put the leader under house arrest in a luxury high rise apartment with a balcony and ex-slaves to wait on him (seems, since Catherine the Great, almost always to be a somewhat sexually insecure HIM).
The ideal way to respond is with a non-proportional response. If the aggressor comes in and destroys $10B of stuff and kills 1000 men, you (the people mounting the defense) go in rapidly and destroy $100B of THEIR stuff and kill 10,000 of THEIR men. If this is done automatically and regularly, you only have to do it a few times and then everyone learns very quickly that it never pays to be an aggressor.
But we don’t do this. Instead we have this ridiculous concept of proportional response. And proportional response is what you do if you want the conflict to last as long as possible. And maybe that’s what politicians and others who profit from war really want.