Here’s a hypothetical situation. You decide to build your own steam generator plant and connect it to the electric grid. No matter where you live, you’d probably have to meet a ton of requirements from whoever controls your electric power, almost surely backed by your government. Yet, according to a recent post by [Bert], a version of this is going on in Europe and, probably, in many more places: unregulated solar power inverters driving the grid.
If you have just a few solar panels hanging around, that probably isn’t a problem. But there are a sizeable number of panels feeding power — and that number seems to grow daily — having control of the inverters could potentially allow you to limit the grid’s capacity or — if the inverters allowed it — possibly take the grid down by feeding power incorrectly back into the grid.
According to [Burt], a small number of companies control most of the inverters in his country — the Netherlands — and there is virtually no regulation about how they operate. While we don’t think he’s suggesting they would act maliciously, you don’t have to search the news very much to find cases where companies have been hacked or made a mistake that caused major impacts to important systems.
Apparently, inverters in the Netherlands do have to meet certain technical standards, but the post since that’s widely unenforced. But the real point is that the companies managing the switches are not regulated or managed. [Burt] thinks that EU-wide legislation is needed to forestall some future disaster.
You might think this isn’t a realistic scenario, but you just have to think about solar energy vulnerable
