US considers ban on Chinese solar inverters

The Trump administration was following the lead of the EU, the sources said, which introduced a ban on public funding for projects using Chinese inverters earlier this year due to their cybersecurity risk.

The proposal could still be modified or shelved entirely, but it speaks to the growing caution across the West over the prevalence of digitally connected Chinese inverters on power grids. Chinese producers, led by Sungrow and Huawei, have grown their market share of solar inverters significantly as prices have fallen and the technology for residential and C&I has broadly become commoditised.

Bloomberg reported that Sungrow’s share price fell 20% following speculation about the US ban.

A ban on Chinese products could be a boon to US-based microinverter producer Enphase and Israeli-headquartered SolarEdge, both of which have US inverter manufacturing capacity. Shutting firms like Huawei and Sungrow out of the US inverter market could make those companies’ products more attractive, along with the potential for the EU’s substantial inverter capacity to fill any shortfall.

PV Tech will follow this story as it develops.

Solar inverter cybersecurity concerns

Conversation about cybersecurity risk in solar inverters went mainstream after Reuters published a report that claimed “rogue communication devices” were found in Chinese inverters in the US. There have been reports refuting that finding since it was published, but the perception of Chinese inverters as a potential gateway to security risks has been solidified.

In December, the EU identified Chinese solar inverters as “high risk” in its Security Doctrine and in April announced the ban on public funding.

The threat potential is real; inverter manufacturers can remotely control their products, and the biggest producers in the European market have access to more than enough capacity to cause real disruption to the grid.

However, there has been disagreement over how to heighten security. While some advocate for bans on Chinese products like those in Europe and potentially the US, there are others who say that technical fixes and requirements would be more effective.

Whether an inverter is made by a Chinese company or not does not necessarily impact whether a malicious actor is able to gain access through a digital back door. The thwarted attack on solar and wind assets in Poland last December, which could have resulted in blackouts and deaths if it was successful, was caused by hackers gaining remote access to around 30 systems, not by an engineer in Beijing being told to turn inverters off.

But experts have warned that depending on China for solar inverters is a serious risk, regardless of the likelihood of orchestrated disruption. Erika Langerova,  head of cybersecurity research at UCEEB, a research centre under the Czech Technical University in Prague, told PV Tech Premium last year that Europe has “swapped one dependency [on Russian gas] for another,” and that Chinese-made inverter products can often be less technically secure than they should be because they “want to be quick on the market and want to sell cheap inverters…which means they oftentimes overlook cybersecurity completely and they ship very cheap but very insecure products.”