> It also made solar inverters illegal last week.

That’s overstating it. A couple clarifications.

It banned foreign (edit) made equipment because it’s known for cybersecurity issues. It was the FCC that restricted new foreign-made connected inverters over grid cybersecurity concerns. [1]

1. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adds-foreign-produced-power...

> This week, the US government paid a wind farm company $1.2 billion to stop building wind farms.

The $1.2B is real, but it wasn’t payment to stop construction. RWE agreed to surrender three offshore wind leases and settle related claims. Anyways, RWE’s three leases were in very early development and weren’t expected online until the 2030s. [2]

You can still think both policies are bad. But those are different claims.

2. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/rwe-says-reached-12...

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inigyou a day ago | parent | next [-]

It banned all foreign made solar inverters i.e. all solar inverters.

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firesteelrain a day ago | parent | next [-]

That’s true. China dominates globally but I found that the US installed European and Japanese models. There is a big supply chain concern and set of reviews happening all across the entire government sector. Energy is a national security concern. [1]

1. https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/solar-photovoltaics-supp...

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margalabargala 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's bad policy.

If one is trying to attack the threat you claim, one might ban all internet capable inverters.

To ban all, even fully offline ones, means the threat you describe is an excuse.

	▲	firesteelrain 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

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margalabargala 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Your other comment got downvoted to death (not by me) so I can't reply to it, so I'm replying here. Sorry the downvoting happened; your comment wasn't incorrect. You're right that inverters with zero connectivity whatsoever are not banned; my comment was overly broad. That said...

The ban covers any inverter with any wireless communication whatsoever. Bluetooth is specifically called out, despite necessarily being local-only and not enabling an internet connection.

I suppose you could make the argument that with Bluetooth, the app that communicates with it has internet access and thus it's the same thing. However:

The ban does not cover a power inverter with no integrated comms, but has a serial port into which is plugged a "sold separately" wifi dongle. Neither does the ban cover an inverter with an ethernet port. It covers solely wireless communication.

	▲	firesteelrain 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
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m463 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"connected power inverters produced in foreign countries"

I think home devices that phone somebody-elses-home are a cancer anyway.

[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-423682A1.pdf

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cogman10 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even if I assumed maximum malice, how are these inverters going to perform a coordinated attack on the grid?

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firesteelrain a day ago | parent | next [-]

> Even if I assumed maximum malice, how are these inverters going to perform a coordinated attack on the grid?

They’re network-connected and remotely controllable. The concern is compromise of the vendor/cloud infrastructure allowing large numbers of inverters to be manipulated simultaneously.

Or even Trojan horse style malware is a possibility I suppose (Stuxnet).

That’s basically the threat model that they are using. If people want to argue with that, then that’s something to poke at

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parineum 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

AC power needs it's sine wave aligned or it's very bad. If a huge chunk of inverters all start dumping power onto the grid that isn't synced, things break.

	▲	inigyou 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can't just "not sync the grid". I think what you mean is if all the country's inverters that are curtailed stop being curtailed and pull the grid out of frequency because they control so much power. Note that every inverter as well as every traditional power plant and many substations will disconnect themselves long before reaching 59 or 61Hz - the most you achieve like that is a blackout.

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ulfw a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Do people really believe this stuff? Wow