Power company engineer here, it’s true that a lot of our supporting and analytics software went down during the AWS event.
However, most devices that actually control grid units (called bulk electric system cyber-assets) are air-gapped or utilize a data diode.
FERC Reliability Standards and NERC CIP
However-er, flipping through those standards just now, turns out it’s 100% permitted to connect your “bulk electric system cyber-asset” to a cloud integration if done compliantly.





Hey I did exactly this a few years ago! Uses an optocoulper for isolation. I flashed ESPHome on it and connected it to my Home Assistant instance.
Works like a charm!
I also hard wired the ESP power pins to the PC via a spare USB header. Then I enabled a BIOS setting to keep USB ports powered when shut down, so it’s a super seamless install.
Only problem I’m having with it lately is since I run a dual boot system, my default GRUB option is Linux, but sometimes (unfortunately) I need to get into Windows. It’s a bit of a pain to have to update grub to change the default then restart again. I’d rather build in some sort of selection functionality the first time it boots.
I’ve been playing around with using another ESP32 as a filesystem USB device, then having grub read the content of a file on said ESP32, either “windows” or “linux”, then booting accordingly. That’s a work in progress tho