I spent two days at a substation connecting a major offshore wind farm to the grid. The control room featured three new AI-ready dashboards and a board mandate to “leverage machine learning for resilience.” It also had a maintenance laptop running Windows 7, literally taped to the inside of a cabinet because the Velcro had failed.
That laptop was the only device in the building that could still talk to the legacy protection relays guarding the grid connection. No patches since 2017. No EDR. No path to an agent-based security model.
I have walked into some version of this scene at energy utilities, automotive plants and pharma sites across sectors and borders for a decade. The dashboards chan...