Over 80% solar inverters Chinese-made, India moves to shield power grid from cyber risks

The Centre has issued guidelines to protect solar power equipment from potential cyberattacks and stop Indian data being used by bad actors abroad.

As per a directive from the renewable ministry, suppliers of rooftop solar inverters will be required to connect these machines to a national software platform hosted on servers in India that will be managed by an Indian government agency, according to Bloomberg.

The directive further said that all communication devices connected to such inverters will be required to use special SIM cards that let machines securely share data without human input. Notably, more than 80 per cent of such devices are made in China.

“Inverter communication modules that transmit data to servers outside India not only pose risks of unauthorised control but also threaten national energy sovereignty by exposing sensitive consumption and generation data,” the renewable ministry said.

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Rooftop solar inverters are considered the most vulnerable part of the green power supply network due to limited technological safeguards, as per Bloomberg.

In recent years, there have been concerns about electronic and renewable equipment’s data-sharing aspects. As a large chunk of such equipment either comes in China and many companies use servers abroad, there are concerns that foreign bad actors could misuse the data or plant some vulnerability in the system or find a vulnerability by studying these systems.

India is not the only country with such concerns. In May, Reuters reported that the United States was assessing the risk posed by Chinese inverters after unexplained communication devices was discovered inside some machines.

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In recent years, China has escalated cyberattacks on nations it treats as adversaries, such as the United States and India. It has particularly targeted critical sectors like energy and telecommunications, attacking power grids and mobile networks. There have also been concerns about Chinese smart devices, such as smartphones, being used by the Chinese regimes to spy on governments and people, that have led to some countries blocking Chinese companies like Huawei from their critical systems.