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Comment by don_esteban | Hacker News Reader

Not only is the renewable energy cheaper, it also raises energy independence, which turns out to be quite relevant in today's world.

Furthermore, it also reduces the drain on the (often very fragile, for thirld world countries) foreign reserves, especially relevant when the oil prices fluctuate wildly.

If your solar panels are old and you don't have money to replace them, you get slightly less electricity. If you are out of gasoline/diesel and you have no money to buy it, you have a big, big, problem.

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This is exactly why I don't think it's a huge risk to be reliant on China for solar panels. If relations between your country and China go bad, it can't be that much of an emergency when they stop exporting them to you. All the panels you already bought still work!

Unless there is some hidden cybersecurity risk of them shutting off panels remotely?

I would be more concerned for remotely triggered inverter spikes tbh. These could sabotage the whole grid if I'm not mistaken.

Yes, exactly. The panel's control system is connected to the Internet and there's an app that an attacker could take advantage of to interfere with critical infrastructure at an inopportune time.

If you are doing grid-scale installation, surely you would want your own control system (perhaps also on your own network, separated from the general internet), precisely in order to protect the grid.

There’s always the issue that it might be hard to find competent people that can implement a control network isolated from the internet if it has an internet connection by default.

This is no different - either way you are buying a system that includes controls. While separating this from the internet sounds great, in practice internet control is too useful to run without. Maybe you put in a few firewall rules to protect things, but these often are lose enough that a hacker and bypass them (by looking like a legitimate access - since the people who need to access this will want to work from their cell phone)

> Unless there is some hidden cybersecurity risk of them shutting off panels remotely?

The weakest link won't be the panels themselves, but the grid infrastructure, or telephony infrastructure. Unless somehow the chinese were able to embed a radiowave activated kill-switch or something. Highly doubt it!

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