Chinese “kill switches” have been found hidden in American solar farms, prompting calls for Ed Miliband to halt the rollout of renewables.
On Thursday, the Energy Secretary was urged to impose an “immediate pause” on his green energy blitz to review whether UK solar plants are also at risk.
The components found in the US included cellular radios capable of switching off the equipment remotely, raising serious concerns about grid security, according to Reuters.
They were found inside power inverters manufactured by unnamed Chinese companies.
Power inverters are the key links between solar or wind farms and the rest of the power system, converting their electricity so the wider grid can use it.
One source told Reuters that compromising such equipment would give Beijing the ability to inflict blackouts on the West, claiming it would create “a built-in way to physically destroy the grid”.
OP, I wish you would stop spreading rumors. As others have pointed out, there’s no real evidence these allegations are credible.
For more context, nearly all modern solar equipment and energy storage devices (like Tesla Powerwalls) come with cellular equipment for firmware updates and production monitoring when there isn’t a better connection available. It’s just how it’s done nowadays, it’s not inherentely nefarious.
Now for some critical thinking. What does China really gain from taking out PV power sources? Those power sources are only producing power less than half the time people need it. Wouldn’t it be better to attack the 24/7 baseload power producers like a gas powerplant? If you take out the PV that gas plant will compensate, just like it does when it’s cloudy. For this reason there’s little point to attacking the auxillary, intermittent power sources.
Such capability would be a source of immense geopolitical power, though it makes more sense for leveraging consessions out of small debtor nations like all the African and South American ones that China is investing infrastructure into. Kinda tricky to use though.
The “theory” is that they’d shut off multiple big solar farms during peak, to damage the grid. But it’s literally just propaganda.
The personal-use solar inverters that let you check power generation from your phone, let you turn them off from your phone as well. And some people and groups have tried to shift that narrative to “ermegerd remote killswitches in industrial scale inverters”. But those aren’t hooked up to the internet and they’re usually in grounded metal boxes. You can’t easily get an outside signal to them.
Hopefully this site is acceptable to the mods…
It is. Sorry for the run around, but rules is rules.
Just call it a backdoor
“They have weaponz of massss disconnection!”
This is a certified journalism moment, making grand claims with nothing but hot air to back it up. Oh well, anything to complain about the Chinese.
So… don’t connect the suspect inverters to the internet? It’s not like they have a magical sattelite link that can’t be blocked…
Not an option. They have to be connected to something, the grid has to be able to monitor and coordinate power plants of any kind remotely and for a solar power plant the inverters are where a lot of that logic happens. Obviously it’s not going to have a public IP accessible to the whole internet, it may not even be connecting across the public internet at all but at the very least there are data collection and monitoring networks woven throughout the entire country and there are all sorts of ways anyone with nation-state level resources, nevermind China who manufactures and supplies so much of the world’s technology, might gain access to them.
So connect it to LAN then for fucks sake, no need to put everything on the internet.
Feel like this was the plot of Homefront Revolution
Imagine being so goddamn ignorant that you mistake VPP capabilities for an attack
America after doing Stuxnet: “hey that’s illegal!”
Just like the ones inside f-35?
Any other source than the telegraph?
“Reuters was unable to determine how many solar power inverters and batteries they have looked at.”
“Both (sources) declined to be named”
“The two people declined to name the Chinese manufacturers of the inverters and batteries with extra communication devices, nor say how many they had found in total.”
“The existence of the rogue devices has not previously been reported. The U.S. government has not publicly acknowledged the discoveries.”
I want to believe, but this is starting to sound like the SuperMicro motherboard panic from a couple years ago.
What was the super micro board panic? I have one of those :/
I imagine 4G-enabled LiFePO₄ BMSs too. Unlike Li-Ion, the cells probablywon’t burst into flames when shorted, but a near-short circuit inside the BMS could heat it up enough to ignite it and things around it.
From the original Reuters article linked in another comment
“Reuters was unable to determine how many solar power inverters and batteries they have looked at.”
“Both (sources) declined to be named”
“The two people declined to name the Chinese manufacturers of the inverters and batteries with extra communication devices, nor say how many they had found in total.”
“The existence of the rogue devices has not previously been reported. The U.S. government has not publicly acknowledged the discoveries.”
And then we told them… gasp chuckle… that there was a Chinese kill-switch… churtle guffaw in the solar panels!
So now… heaving laugh-sigh they have to buy more… hiccup-laugh natural gas from the United States!
And it was also noted by other commenters that it’s likely a default chopset that is used rather than anything actually nefarious. Most people are unaware of how many regular devices contain disabled hardware because it’s cheaper to make one board and modify it than make a million custom ones for every cheap thing.
I suspect it is just the Emergency Rapid Shutdown, which all newer PV systems must incorporate.
Okay, so there apparently seems to be a type of information warfare happening. Where we as consumers are finding security holes in all sorts of important infrastructure which every major supplier seems to be allowing government level access to Cell towers, PBX systems, L3 backbone internet, power generation and delivery including solar inverters. Huawei got caught up in it a couple years ago and before that Cisco, now with more evidence mounting from the pagers in Lebanon and Palestine a couple months ago.
Or a propaganda campaign
This needs more downvotes. What a crock of FUD.
