Image by Maria Godfrida from Pixabay

By Jo Nova

Nice grid you have there, shame if someone suddenly… switched it off

Two insiders at the US Dept of Energy say they have found covert devices inside solar panel inverters and batteries that would allow them to communicate with China. Even though firewalls have been put in place, these backdoor devices could operate around them.

Last August a Dutch white hat hacker got into 4 million panels in 150 countries in an effort to warn the West that major infrastructure was vulnerable. A month later an Australian cyber expert warned that a foreign hacker could turn our home batteries into “pager-bombs” too. If a hostile power turned off the overcharge protection on a sunny day, millions of solar panels would be pumping excess electricity into batteries that have no safety cut off. A few houses start to go off like popcorn, and an hour later we’re all living at the Western Front. How exactly would our firemen cope if 1 in 100 homes caught fire at the same time, and then we had a blackout? Anyone?

Individual solar panel inverters are generally too small to trigger national security assessments, but right now at lunchtime solar power is the largest single source of electricity in Australia — making 13 gigawatts out of 27. That’s half our national supply. In summer it’s worse.

We’ve turned our duck curve into a sitting duck…

It’s a win every which way for China if we install more solar panels. Not only are we paying them for the panels, and sanctifying their slavery, but we set fire to our electricity prices, driving our factories to China where they burn our coal. Now to ice this Gridkill Gateau we hand them a backdoor for sabotage or extortion should they ever get the urge to use it.

No wonder China is funding climate activists in the US and UK. They’d be crazy if they weren’t doing it here too.

This is Fall of Rome type stuff, and we’ve got Chris ‘Blackout’ Bowen to save us…

The only good thing about this is that while we were destroying our industrial base with solar panels anyway, the hidden transmitters are so overtly hostile, so in-your-face nasty, that sleeping Westerners might even wake up. Holy smoke. Does anyone think those secret radios were put there to help us?

Reuters: Rogue communication devices found in Chinese solar power inverters

LONDON, May 14 (Reuters) – U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said.

However, rogue communication devices not listed in product documents have been found in some Chinese solar power inverters by U.S experts who strip down equipment hooked up to grids to check for security issues, the two people said. Over the past nine months, undocumented communication devices, including cellular radios, have also been found in some batteries from multiple Chinese suppliers, one of them said.

The rogue components provide additional, undocumented communication channels that could allow firewalls to be circumvented remotely, with potentially catastrophic consequences, the two people said.

“We know that China believes there is value in placing at least some elements of our core infrastructure at risk of destruction or disruption,” said Mike Rogers, a former director of the U.S. National Security Agency. “I think that the Chinese are, in part, hoping that the widespread use of inverters limits the options that the West has to deal with the security issue.”

In November, solar power inverters in the U.S. and elsewhere were disabled from China, highlighting the risk of foreign influence over local electricity supplies and causing concern among government officials, three people familiar with the matter said.
Reuters was unable to determine how many inverters were switched off, or the extent of disruption to grids. The DOE declined to comment on the incident.

The Communist Party could have said that they would never sanction such a hostile act, and it must be a company acting alone, but they didn’t:

A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington said: “We oppose the generalisation of the concept of national security, distorting and smearing China’s infrastructure achievements.”

Infrastructure achievements indeed. A Freudian slip?

There is plenty of risk to share around:

The European Solar Manufacturing Council estimates over 200 GW of European solar power capacity is linked to inverters made in China – equivalent to more than 200 nuclear power plants. At the end of last year, there was 338 GW of installed solar power in Europe, according to industry association SolarPower Europe.

Though Europe is saved, somewhat, by having lots of interconnectors and not much sun. That is, apart from Portugal, Spain and Greece, and we still don’t know what caused that blackout that started in the solar farms?

In Australian Senator James Paterson was warning this was possible in August 2023, saying 58% of solar panel inverters in Australia were made by companies headquartered in China. And what have we done?  We installed another half a million solar PV units on homes in Australia.

Gangbusters on the gang-plank.