HEADLINE: “China Can Cause Blackouts In US And Europe Through Solar Inverter Technology, Suggest Officials”, By MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER
“Governments around the world are investigating and banning Chinese inverters after radio and backdoor kill switches discovered.”
China Can Cause Blackouts In US And Europe Through Solar Inverter Technology, Suggest Officials
Governments around the world are investigating and banning Chinese inverters after radio and backdoor kill switches discovered
MAY 16
It sounds like the far-fetched plot of a cheesy James Bond movie: the Chinese military causes civilization-crippling blackouts around the world, plunging cities from San Francisco to Berlin to Seoul into chaos, while invading Taiwan. Hospitals stall. Subways freeze. Data centers go dark.
But it’s not far-fetched. In fact, China just demonstrated that it has the power and may be willing to use it.
Last November, a Chinese solar company named Deye remotely shut down solar power systems in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Pakistan. “This inverter is not allowed use [sic] at Pakistan/USA/UK,” read the message on the inverter screen. “Pls return to your supplier.”
What the Chinese did was simple, and straight out of a Bond movie: they effectively built remote-controlled cellular radios into the inverters.
Under China’s National Intelligence Law, Chinese companies are legally obligated to cooperate with state intelligence services upon request. This has led to concerns that equipment from companies like Huawei could be compelled to provide data or access to Chinese authorities, potentially posing risks to foreign infrastructure.
For decades, renewable energy advocates promised that “distributed” generation of electricity from solar panels and batteries would reduce the risk of blackouts and sabotage.
It’s now clear that that argument was exactly backwards: solar increases the fragility and vulnerability of the grid to blackouts and sabotage by enlarging what military strategists call the grid’s “attack surface,” measured as the total number of points in a network.
The distributed and supposedly more resilient green energy system now looks, under adversarial pressure, like a battlefield mapped in advance for asymmetric warfare.
One scenario for a Chinese-initiated blackout, say experts, would be during if, after an invasion of Taiwan, the US responded militarily. Just a single command to embedded cellular radios or firmware backdoors already built into millions of the small electrical boxes known as inverters, which convert DC solar electricity to AC grid electricity, could instantly take down the power supply for tens of millions of people, undermining a US response.
“We know that China believes there is value in placing at least some elements of our core infrastructure at risk of destruction or disruption,” Former National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers told Reuters. “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.”
Reuters reports that “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.” The experts also found cellular radios in batteries from “multiple Chinese suppliers.”
Solar only generated about seven percent of total electricity last year, but supplies a larger share of electricity during daylight hours, up to 70% in California. Thus, even a small, sudden disruption could cause total blackout.
With over 5 million solar installations, most using inverters, many if not most of them Chinese-made and internet- or radio-connected, the risk is no longer abstract.
In Europe, more than 200 gigawatts of solar power rely on inverters from Chinese manufacturers like Huawei, Sungrow, and Ginlong Solis. If just 5% of those inverters were shut off at the sudden loss in supply could plunge grid frequency below safe levels, triggering automatic shutdowns, load shedding, and cascading blackouts.
A cybersecurity firm last year revealed 46 separate vulnerabilities in solar inverters from top manufacturers that would allow them to remotely hijack, disable, or corrupt power systems at scale. The report found that 80% of inverter-related vulnerabilities disclosed in recent years were high or critical severity, with nearly a third allowing full device takeover.
“By exploiting these weaknesses,” it wrote, “cybercriminals could manipulate power generation at scale and trigger coordinated load-changing attacks to destabilize the grid—potentially leading to emergency power measures, grid disconnections, or even blackouts.”
By replacing a few hardened power plants with millions of unsecured digital endpoints, renewable energy advocates didn’t decentralize resilience, they decentralized vulnerability. Every rooftop inverter, every battery controller, every radio-equipped firmware module becomes a node that can be compromised, spoofed, or switched off.
And sabotage is just one of two major ways that the solar and inverter-based electricity puts the grid at risk. Spain’s overreliance on solar and inverters caused a nationwide blackout two weeks ago.
Unlike conventional power plants, which use spinning turbines to provide grid inertia and resist sudden fluctuations, inverter-based systems, such as for solar, wind, and batteries, lack the physical momentum to absorb shocks. Without inertia, frequency and voltage can spiral out of control in milliseconds.
Why hasn’t the US government fixed this? And why are nations still blindly expanding solar and inverter electricity given the threats from blackouts and sabotage?
BOTTOMLINE: “A cybersecurity firm last year revealed 46 separate vulnerabilities in solar inverters from top manufacturers that would allow them to remotely hijack, disable, or corrupt power systems at scale. The report found that 80% of inverter-related vulnerabilities disclosed in recent years were high or critical severity, with nearly a third allowing full device takeover.”
Omg what an eye opener