FCC bans foreign-produced solar inverters, grid lockout begins today | Hacker News Reader

FCC bans foreign-produced solar inverters, grid lockout begins today

pv-magazine-usa.com

65 pointsxbmcuser48 comments

while I totally understand the risk of foreign hardware and firmware, this is exclusively a sabotage of green power development confirmed by the methodology and speed of implementation of it.

blocking related projects by forcing a supply chain re-co figuration and disconnect from grid for non compliancy it's a clear targeted sabotage and does not mitigate the risk! -> us produced inverter with asian chips and firmware anyway!

this is only devolution and it can happen only there, especially WITHOUT a clear transition or migration plan that considers hardware, industry and infrastructure!

if more power is needed, and power costs are increasing, why force disconnect and sabotage development for green power? dont forget to do 1+1 with the reality of your state dear citizens!

Counterpoint - building out even more critical infrastructure which might as well be coming pre-rootkitted by a known foreign adversary seems quite dumb?

nope, that's the defacto standard for the past 30 years and I was against it for security reasons, it was not dumb it was convenient in times of peace for many!

so I agree if my country would produce and enforce usage of country developed inverters with a correct and ramp up plan to reach that.

but hard cutting it without having the infrastructure and market ready to compensate that is just full "rword"ness.

and then there will be still parts of boards and chips coming anyway from external suppliers and being "fake" ?

what about the real crit infra beside solar and wind? what about the supply chain there? fully localized? 3rd party and 4th party fully audited?

is just a joke

there's no evidence for the countpoint; so it's mostly counterparanoia.

There is a ton of evidence that equipment out of China can come with built-in backdoors and worse.

at best, theres evidence of the same guilty poorly built software and hardware because capitalism is king

king, youre angry at capitalism not some super uber foreign suveillance program.

its like being angry that someone entered your house cause you bought a cheap door and its lock broke.

I have it on good authority that the Soviets also made crap.

yes, but we're talking about how the Chinese produce crap that's built cheaply, sold cheaply, ends up in American's hands and it's buggy and insecure; and instead of thinking, gee, perhaps capitalism isn't building the best products for my security they think "oh gee, the chinese have a whole apparatus of surveillance looking to get into my <insert todays problem>. Then someone exploits sed insecurity and the circle of paranoia is complete.

It's basically the digital version of chinese weather balloons. Lets just spend 250k shooting it down cause there's a 1% chance it's voodoo magic.

You realize that a lot of these devices have been found to phone home to servers in the motherland, right? Without informing the user they were doing so? Or would be expected for the class and function of device? You wanna explain how that was just “buggy and insecure”?

A device calling home and posting data is normality since many years already and does not directly represent a security risk for the normal user, based also on the fact that this communication is often covered by his vendor policy acceptance.

what's bad is if the vendor is sending data that should not be sent or collected and if the vendor leaves the device insecure, especially on purpose. In relation to the inverter case yes that can represent potential risk since it would be part of the grid too, hence near to crit infra and maybe even able to influence it.

Additionally network can be controlled, limited and inspected, that's a bit different for a hidden backdoor or hardcoded creds in a flashed firmware on a chip.

pretty much anything could be hidden in a firmware update over SSL, yeah?

I’m pointing out this has literally nothing to do with Capitalism.

If anything, this move is ANTI capitalist.

It's billionaires enforcing their monopolies.

Which of them has a monopoly on US produced inverters?

If they could prohibit internet communications and allow LAN communications, that would be great.

Also, it should apply regardless of where they are manufactured. It's far more likely for an attack to happen through a compromised centralized server, or a worm compromising embedded servers en masse, than it is for an authority to directly petition an attack.

Also, my inverter wasn't manufactured in China, but the Wi-Fi module was made by Shanghai MXCHIP Information Technology Co., so it's no less vulnerable.

Can someone more familiar with the technology explain how necessary it is for the inverter to be internet connected? This seems like the kind of cloud dependency that people on HN would usually be opposed to.

Smart inverters allow energy companies to reduce the solar power sent to the grid to improve grid stability, avoid overload conditions etc.

A small solar inverter doesn't need to be internet connected, but solar inverter app monitoring lets you track energy production, view real-time power flows, and check device status using a smartphone or tablet. So automaticaly you could get all the IoT security issues.

https://solar-assistant.io/

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/solarman-smart/id1469487897

If an attacker could control a significant portion of solar inverters in a solar dominated grid, he could cause an blackout, under right conditions.

More in presentations at CCC:

"How to cause blackout"

https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7323-wie_man_einen_blackout_veru...

"BlinkenCity: Radio-Controlling Street Lamps and Power Plants"

https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-blinkencity-radio-controlling-st...

Large solar invertors at large solar plants muss be under remote controling of grid operators, to allow solar curtailment when the solar production exceeds electric demand or grid transmission could be overloaded. This is not specific to solar power plants, other kinds of power plants are also under control of grid operators.

With increased deployment of residential solar its possible that this controlling will be extented also to residential solar.

With sufficiently badly designed systems (lack of sufficient manual interlocks), it should also be possible to cause co-ordinated widespread fires and property damage or the like, with resulting loss of life.

There was a good grid generator demonstration years ago (aurora generator cyber attack), and most cheap inverters are likely even dumber than what was demonstrated there.

Likely? Probably not with current geopolitics.

Possible? Hard to say, but certainly unlikely to be completely impossible.

Security being the S in IoT and all, and most of these inverter stacks are pretty typical of IoT.

> A small solar inverter doesn't need to be internet connected, but solar inverter app monitoring lets you track energy production, view real-time power flows, and check device status using a smartphone or tablet

... over USB or Bluetooth. Internet is solely for convenience.

So is 90% of everything we use the internet for.

It’s also possible to pay my bills via check sent via USPS (for now), but I bet at least 80% of your typical utility customers use the online portal.

So is 90% of everything attackers use the internet for.

And re loss from an attack, your bill payment is not comparable to a solar inverter.

Yeah, it’s easier to drain my bank account than explode a random inverter (probably).

And one of them gets them paid.

None of this requires internet connection.

How do you expect your typical mobile app to work through NAT, etc. without an internet connection? For your typical ‘dumb’ home user, anyway?

It should not. There is exactly zero reason for all this data to leave the premises.

> For your typical ‘dumb’ home user

Well, yeah. That's the problem. There is no explanation to the dumb user why this stat is only available while connected to home network.

My solar production data is fed to my ISO so I can sell clean energy vouchers. My solar installer just called me the other day asking if I had a tree shading a panel, because production on that panel was low. There are plenty of reasons to have internet connected solar equipment.

Outbound connection to your provider with stats? Good.

Random connection to any IP especially on China territory? Absolutely not.

But that IP is your provider, and the data being sent is stats.

How do you know that, or can predict it?

Regardless of broadband existing or not, there was never supposed to be an abscence of dial-up.

Using IPv6! But also we should ban IPv6 because of security! Letting devices connect to each other without bouncing through a central server is a security risk! (This is a popular opinion on HN)

Its sold to consumers as stats & diagnostics. Companies do this to sell your data and in hopes of roping you into recurring revenue schemes.

Absolute cowardice & wanton destruction of the world, this. This is just a political ploy, on no merit, and it's the same anything-and-everything as the administration pulled to prevent cheap, effective, capable wind power from happening. https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-national-secu... https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/wind/states-lawsuit-tru...

It's nonsense and there's no pretense, no data otherwise. The party of drill baby drill isn't about better power, about using mineral rights: it's about crony-istic state control of industry, about vested interests, about bribery corruption and grift for insiders. (That and/or they are actively trying to destroy the country wholesale, are barbarians within seeking only to destroy.)

I do think there is one step I'd like to see the world take in reply, that would make this be much funnier: "we don't ship the software, you have to run that yourself". Start an open source Zephyr IoT project for inverters, and just don't distribute the software. Make people just buy the hardware. I for one welcome the world where the two come separate. I think it would be a remarkable upgrade for humanity to decouple the two, and it would be bitterly hilarious if these batshit loons somehow end up accidentally creating the better world. I can't think of what other reply would have anywhere near the force of effect of making absolute mock, and it would radically improve things. This should happen.

I would not call offshore wind cheap, as can bee seen in Germany in the 2025 Germany's No-Subsidy Offshore Wind Auction.

https://www.offshorewind.biz/2025/08/06/germanys-2-5-gw-offs...

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/analyzing-failure-germanys-no...

Private investors are currently not willing to invest into offshore wind at market pricing.

Solar is much cheaper.

1. Solar may be cheaper on average, but the Trump admin wouldn’t have to be banning companies from pursuing wind and rescinding wind leases that companies had chosen to purchase (as GP commenter linked) if companies didn’t think wind was a way to generate electricity that could also generate a profit.

2. Combining wind with other forms of renewables can also be an excellent option as wind can also generate electricity at night, in more northern climates, etc.

The Trump administration is opposed to wind power, we all know that. On the other hand the claim from the article https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-national-secu... is :

"Burgum says he’s worried about autonomous drones going through a wind tower field undetected because of radar interference. And, he said, the vibration of wind towers could affect undersea sonar."

Maybe it's false, maybe it's true, but we can't say it for sure, because exact capabilities and limitation of military radars are classified. Personally, I think it's a half-truth, military radars have problems with detection of small slow flying drones through wind farm with a lot of moving turbine blades, but it's very improbable that someone would attack US using drones flying through offshore wind farm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar#Clutter

2. Combining wind with other forms of renewables doesn't make it cheaper, but more expensive, you to build more machines, infrastructure. But in all cases, for weather dependent renewables like wind power, you have build some backup power generation for the times when wind is too weak, or too strong and wind power plant doesn't generate enough electricity.

It's interesting to see that offshore wind without subsidies is not competitive even in Germany, where natural gas is much more expensive then in US. European wholesale gas is roughly 4 to 5 times more expensive than in the U.S. market.

Similar situation in UK, Belgium, Japan, India

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66749344

https://www.renews.biz/offshore-wind/belgium-halts-princess-...

https://www.renews.biz/offshore-wind/gwec-urges-japan-to-ref...

https://www.renews.biz/offshore-wind/india-scraps-4-5gw-offs...

Not like the threat was in the room with us this entire time.

Looking at all those APC UPSes that had the TLSstorm exploit and possibility of actual burnout and fire...

But sure. It's the evil evil Chinese shit that's the problem.

I feel so much safer knowing we banned things like Autel's drones, random power inverters, and Unitree robots, but not Autel's key programmers kids are using to steal cars!

Funny thing searching "autel teenager stolen cars" and seeing hundreds of police releases of kids getting busted with guns and Autel tablets and a shitton of universally programmable keys. I feel so much safer knowing the Chinese drones can't spy on me while the kids steal my car. :)

i mean at least you can sue apc

You can also due whoever imports faulty Chinese equipment. With cross-border trade, the importer becomes liable for everything the manufacturer would be liable for if it was domestically manufactured.

the scale of this order is breath taking, it is a massive windfall for projects outside of the US, as depending on how contracts were written, american companys are still be on the hook to take delivery and will now have to resell at a discount, which may all get lost in various financial restructuring and bankruptcys, while setting US solar back years, add in that the latest bump in oil futures means that demand for solar just went up, and not only the inverters, but the specialists who design the systems that use them, will be able to find something to do. The other thing is that ANY project useing a chip from China, will now be hitting pause. wow.

> prove their code cannot be manipulated remotely

That's not technically possible, surely.

What the hell does the FCC have to do witb power inverters? Dont they have some drone pilots to harass or something?

Aren't responsible for certifying?

all electronics need FCC certification to say they don't emit radio interference. The FCC has just decertified several classes of electronics - taking away their certificate of "this doesn't emit radio interference" - for political ideological reasons that have nothing to do with radio interference.

It's Trump's handlers finding any legally available lever to pull, like how they started tariffs "to fight slavery" the other week because they found a law letting them impose tariffs against slave countries.

We've finally imported European style technology regulation

Eh, European tech regulation at very least has some sane steelman published and documented, even if we personally disagree with that reasoning.

Europe does not have this style of regulations.

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