a day ago
- Consumer and business solar panels in the Netherlands are centrally managed by a few foreign companies via apps and websites, controlling over 25 GW of capacity, equivalent to at least 25 Borssele nuclear plants.
- These cloud-based management platforms can accidentally, through hacking, or intentionally shut down millions of solar panels simultaneously, risking a collapse of the European power grid.
- Unlike large power plants, these central managers face almost no regulation, even though they control vast power capacities, while ethical hackers have confirmed the vulnerability.
- The issue extends to heat pumps, home batteries, and charging stations, with almost all popular inverter brands found to be trivially hackable.
- Proposed solutions include removing the central on/off switch or regulating central managers as electricity utilities, leveraging upcoming EU laws like NIS2 (Cyberbeveiligingswet) and the Cyber Resilience Act.
- SolarPower Europe calls for explicit inclusion of solar panel fleet managers under these cybersecurity laws, with Germany and Australia already having some rules, though enforcement is weak.