Tag Archives: Prosumers

Power Packed Cyber Security?

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Given my evident enthusiasm for all things V2x, regular readers may be wondering why I have been more hesitant than most commentators to unequivocally applaud Greg Jackson’s announcement of Octopus Energy’s “Power Pack” retail vehicle-to-grid offer last week? £299 per month which covers all your electric mobility needs including “fuel”. What’s not to like? Surely it’s “a compelling consumer offer”, as I myself put it!

As already hinted at in my introductory article linked to above, perhaps it’s not quite so attractive if you are in fact a “prosumer”, with a few solar PV panels already installed on your very own roof? Here are some other recent items of news to ponder too. In these troubled times hackers are hard at work around the world. There was initial speculation that the recent Spanish “blackout” was a cyber attack. However, according to the BBC on April 29th:

The Spanish grid operator has ruled out a cyber attack as the cause of a massive power cut that crippled Spain, Portugal and parts of France on Monday.

Red Eléctrica’s operations director Eduardo Prieto said preliminary findings suggest “there was no kind of interference in the control systems” to imply an attack, echoing Portuguese Prime Minister Luís Montenegro the day before.

But the exact reason behind the cut is still unclear.

More recently, it was announced on June 17th that:

In January 2025, we participated in Pwn2Own Automotive with multiple targets. One of them was the Tesla Wall Connector — the home charger for electric vehicles (including non-Tesla ones)…

This article explains how we studied the device, how we built a Tesla car simulator to communicate with the charger, and how we exploited this logic bug during the competition.

The “hackers” of the Tesla wallbox wore “white hats”, but what might have happened if they had been wearing “black hats” instead? While you ponder your answer to that question, you may find it reassuring that the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre has been worrying about it for quite some time. According to the NCSC’s web site their mission is:

Making the UK the safest place to live and work online.

We support the most critical organisations in the UK, the wider public sector, industry, SMEs as well as the general public. When incidents do occur, we provide effective incident response to minimise harm to the UK, help with recovery, and learn lessons for the future.

The first example use case for their efforts reads:

Defending the digital infrastructure on which a sustainable world depends.

For example, by helping to protect a flexible energy system from cyber threats.

Image courtesy of ImageFX

In November 2023 the NCSC published a blog post that began as follows:

In 2020, the NCSC published a white paper on Preparing for Quantum-Safe Cryptography. This paper explained the threat that a possible future quantum computer – one much larger, and much more capable, than any that exist today – would pose to a large class of widely deployed cryptography. That cryptography is known as public-key cryptography (PKC). PKC is the enabling technology for secure communication at scale, on the internet and many other networks.

The same white paper also explains why NCSC’s recommended mitigation of the quantum computing threat is quantum-safe cryptography, or post-quantum cryptography (PQC). PQC is cryptography that is resistant to attack by quantum computers, and also to today’s digital, or classical, computers. Furthermore, PQC offers broadly equivalent functionality to the quantum-vulnerable PKC currently in use, and can be deployed in many of today’s devices (including PCs, smartphones etc.) with a software update.

This seems like a simple solution to the threat from a potentially disruptive technology. And conceptually, it is – but the migration to PQC is a very complicated undertaking. This blog explains why.

Do you suppose that Greg and/or the Octopus Power Pack team have read it?

European Commission Proposes the Redesign of European Electricity Markets

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In a press release on Wednesday the European Commission announced that:

As part of the Energy Union strategy, today the Commission presented proposals to deliver a new deal for energy consumers, to launch a redesign of the European electricity market, to update energy efficiency labelling and to revise the EU Emissions Trading System.

The package is an important step towards implementing the Energy Union strategy with a forward looking climate change policy, launched as one of the political priorities of the Juncker Commission in February 2015. Today’s proposals give prominence to the “energy efficiency first” principle and put households and business consumers at the heart of the European energy market.

The most relevant section to us here at V2G UK reads as follows:

The Energy Union strategy is designed to help deliver our 2030 climate and energy targets and make sure that the European Union becomes the world leader in renewable energy. Achieving these goals will require a fundamental transformation of Europe’s electricity system including the redesign of the European electricity market.

Today’s Communication launches a Public Consultation on what the new electricity market design should look like in order to meet consumers’ expectations, deliver real benefits from new technology, facilitate investments, notably in renewables and low carbon generation; and recognise the interdependence of European Member States when it comes to energy security.

This should reap maximum benefits from cross-border competition and allow decentralised electricity generation, including for self-consumption and support the emergence of innovative energy service companies.

There is another press release that goes into the “new electricity market design” in more detail, explaining that:

Market design is the set of arrangements which govern how market actors generate, trade, supply and consume electricity and use the electricity infrastructure.

It is important that these arrangements, or in other words the design, can transform the energy system, and enable network operators, generators and consumers – both households and industry – to take full advantage of new technology.

The wholesale and retail markets should provide the basis for investment decisions, and boost the development of new services by innovative companies. In a network industry like electricity, an effective market design needs effective regulatory oversight, in particular distribution and transmission system operators.

The European Commission’s new electricity market design initiative aims to improve the functioning of the internal electricity market in order to allow electricity to move freely to where and when it is most needed, reap maximum benefits for society from cross-border competition and provide the right signals and incentives to drive the right investments, while fully integrating increasing shares of renewable energies.

An accompanying document explains that “By adjusting demand, consumers can
save up to €5 billion a year”:

However as you can see there’s nothing in the infographic about how a future “European Energy Union” will help “prosumers” purses get filled to overflowing with euros thanks to making static and/or mobile distributed energy storage available to the local distribution grid at its hours of greatest need. It looks as though we’ll have to fill in a form “by Thursday 8 October 2015 at the latest” and let the EC know our views on that subject!