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Nobody wants to say China
A couple of weeks ago at the Australian Clean Energy summit, there was a dawning realization that in our rush to diversify the energy grid we are accidentally “diversifying” our cyber security risks too.
Where, once upon a time, we could double and triple check the barriers around big old coal plants, now we have opened electronic doors to our grid on homes all over Australia. Energy geniuses told us solar panels would be decentralized, but instead, now that Australia has 25,000 megawatts of household solar, we have to add wireless gadgets to control them remotely. And some of these gadgets are coming in from fly-by-night small time operators. If, hypothetically, a foreign power wanted to be mean, or just hold an extra negotiating or blackmail card up its sleeve, we’re making it very easy. If Mr Chin wants something approved, he could say “Nice grid you have there…”
Small scale solar is so big, As Williamson points out, that it supplied 13% of the electricity to the NEM so far this year. And in Western Australia, it has generated 20%. (Boy is the West in trouble?)
On top of this, to deal with […]
Image by Maria Godfrida from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Nice grid you have there, shame if someone suddenly… switched it off
Two insiders at the US Dept of Energy say they have found covert devices inside solar panel inverters and batteries that would allow them to communicate with China. Even though firewalls have been put in place, these backdoor devices could operate around them.
Last August a Dutch white hat hacker got into 4 million panels in 150 countries in an effort to warn the West that major infrastructure was vulnerable. A month later an Australian cyber expert warned that a foreign hacker could turn our home batteries into “pager-bombs” too. If a hostile power turned off the overcharge protection on a sunny day, millions of solar panels would be pumping excess electricity into batteries that have no safety cut off. A few houses start to go off like popcorn, and an hour later we’re all living at the Western Front. How exactly would our firemen cope if 1 in 100 homes caught fire at the same time, and then we had a blackout? Anyone?
Individual solar panel inverters are generally too small to trigger national security […]
Battery bombs in the suburbs?
By Jo Nova
You think exploding pagers was a wicked trick….
Hypothetically, suppose you were distracted while you tried to change tropospheric jet streams, and accidentally gave away your national manufacturing to a foreign adversary. Next thing you know, you’re buying the batteries they make, and installing them in essential grid infrastructure and thousands of homes. You’re patting yourself on the back for getting a cheap deal (never mind the slaves) and it all seems dandy until one sunny day, a leader who was cheesed off with a trade deal, quietly switched off the “overcharge protection” on all of them remotely.
At that point, millions of solar panels are pumping excess electricity into batteries that have no safety cut off. A few houses start to go off like popcorn, and an hour later we’re all living at the Western Front.
Brian Craighead – chief executive of Energy Renaissance, has come to warn us — it’s a hidden threat to national security. He says Australia has already installed 220,000 batteries that were made in potentially unfriendly places, and each home battery has roughly 7,500 times as much energy as a pager. As he […]
By Jo Nova
What if a few gigawatts of solar power disappeared without a warning or a cloud in the sky?
Imagine a hostile force had control of half your national power generation at lunchtime and could just flip a switch to bring you to your knees? Or how about a crime syndicate wanting a ransom paid by 5pm?
Steve Milloy: Communist China is setting us up for solar panel-based disaster:
“Solar panels that make the electricity suitable for the power grid and which are usually connected to the web, can be “easily hacked, remotely disabled or used for DDoS [Distributed Denial of Service] attacks.” DDoS is one of the most common types of attacks, which basically try to overwhelm a system… Solar panels were outlined as a vulnerability in several scenarios, also due to the dominance of a single country, China, in the supply chain.”
It’s only a week without electricity…
Daniel Croft, CyberDaily (October 2023)
Cyber Security CRC chief executive Rachael Falk said… that an attack on the solar grid could spark a “black start” event, which could result in the entire power grid going down. … “This […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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