Satellite outage knocks out thousands of Enercon's wind turbines (opens in new tab)

So, it did not "knock out" the turbines, it only knocked out communication with them. That reasonably upsets Enercon, and maybe Enercon's customers, but appears not to reduce the power output from the turbines, so probably shouldn't worry the rest of us much, if they can re-establish contact without relying on the satellite link, which they should do anyway, and if it does not mean that somebody else can take over control of the turbines.

Knowing how equipment is built these days, it would be not at all surprising if in fact it were easy to crack into these turbines' control channels and make them destroy themselves. That doesn't seem to be what has happened here, yet. But sometimes, forcing somebody to go to a backup control method is a first step in breaking in, if the backup method is more easily cracked into.

I worked a few years as a telecom engineer in France: wind turbine promoters have to consult telecom operators to prevent disrupting existant MW links with their projects. The usual rule was to observe a 500m clearance between MW line-of-sight paths (1st Fresnel zone) and future wind turbine installations.

Edit: you can read more about all this in this paper: https://castlerockmicrowave.com/wp-content/uploads/Wind-Farm...

I don't think satellite internet is that much cheaper but, I might be wrong. I am no network engineer. Anyone who CAN comment on that?

I suspect the real answer though is that satellite theoretically everywhere regardless of geography on the installation site, so you only have to build one type of unit rather than multiple variants. That probably makes life easier (cheaper) for everyone.

Obviously that’s assuming a country doesn’t decide to disrupt entire communication networks in a murder rampage into their neighbouring countries.