Comment by tencentshill
3 hours ago
Plug-in solar is very new in the US. They just banned all chinese inverters so solar is going to get a lot more expensive anyways.
3 hours ago
Plug-in solar is very new in the US. They just banned all chinese inverters so solar is going to get a lot more expensive anyways.
That's news to me, when did that happen?
They banned importing internet-connected foreign-produced inverters. (https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-423682A1.txt) They are perfectly legal to sell without built-in connectivity, and external monitoring methods aren't prohibited. The concern is that a coordinated network attack on solar inverters could bring down the power grid.
They don't go into details, but check out the Aurora Generator Test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Generator_Test Running solar inverters in opposite phase to the grid would likely not immediately damage them, instead they would draw the amount of power they'd normally provide. In some parts of the US, especially during peak summer demand, even a small percentage of solar power doing this could cause a cascading outage, knocking entire multi-state power grids offline. (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003)
Granted, this could still happen with compromised US-produced inverters, but it's something we should be paying close attention to and planning around.