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
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.