US energy officials have found unexplained communication equipment inside some Chinese-made inverter devices.

Archived

US energy officials have found unexplained communication equipment inside some Chinese-made inverter devices.

[…]

Reuters reported the presence of undocumented and “rogue” communication devices in a number of Chinese-made solar inverters. These could potentially introduce unregulated and undocumented remote communication channels to the inverters, by which an actor could remotely bypass the cybersecurity firewalls that utility companies use to prevent direct communication back to China.

[…]

  • @[email protected]English
    52•3 days ago

    Ok, what are European vendors for inverters? I really want solar, but I would prefer local vendors.

    • federal reverseMEnglish
      10•3 days ago

      Fronius, SMA, Victron.

      The unfortunate bit is that apparently e.g. Huawei inverters are extremely reliable, whereas e.g. cheaper SMA models are not.

        • federal reverseMEnglish
          2•2 days ago

          In case you’re referring to the comment by HowRu68 above, I don’t think that those software vulns are related to this issue at all.

      • paraphrandEnglish
        5•3 days ago

        I wonder if an incentive to be well built and reliable ends up being the fact they are strategic assets that can be “called into service” for decades.

        This is some conspiracy brain thinking, but… they did find secret communication devices…

    • @[email protected]English
      17•3 days ago

      Fronius is Austrian and there are a few others but none producing microinverters that I’m aware of. If you are doing an install with no shading issues during the day, regular inverters are preferable though since the costs are cheaper and there’s no DC-AC-DC loss if you include a battery backup.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•3 days ago

      There are some for the mid to large scale, which this would affect. Less so for small scale like <<100 kWp.