There’s a limited supply of oil. It’s very expensive and wars are fought for it.

There is endless sunlight. It’s free and no wars are fought for it.

Let’s choose solar.

@nickofnz

Not quite. 85% of the whole PV supply chain is controlled by one country - #China

https://www.iea.org/reports/securing-clean-energy-technology-supply-chains

Not saying PV is wrong on itself, but the current European model of “energy transformation” where all manufacturing was outsourced to a hostile country is just as suicidal as previous outsourcing of fossil fuels to Russia.

@kravietz except panels will work fine for decades, while fuel will do it's job exactly once.

It's difference between owning and subscription

@nickofnz

@mo @nickofnz

Yes, there’s definitely huge difference between fuel and generation infrastructure, except it’s not as simple as “buy once, use for decades”:

  • due to very low surface power density of PV you need millions of these
  • each year some of them fail, which you need to replace, and the whole economic viability depends on prices of these planned for decades in advance
  • PV depend on inverters and most of the Chinese ones come with firmware backdoors that are remotely exploitable

@kravietz
solar cell is literally just thin silicon plate with wires, under glass, if you don't throw rocks on it there's no point of failure

Do you have any sources on remote exploits in inverters, or it's just speculations?
Because inverter (especially producing constant frequency AC) is such a simple device, you literally don't need any microprocessor to run it, neither connect it to network

@nickofnz

@mo @nickofnz

if you don’t throw rocks on it there’s no point of failure

How about hailstorm or strong wind? There are documented cases where each of them have annihilated whole PV farms in one go.

any sources on remote exploits in inverters

Of course: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-gigantic-unregulated-power-plants-in-the-cloud/

That’s one reason why NIS2 was extended to energy sector, against the protests of the PV sector who of course moaned about “cost increases”.

neither connect it to network

Unfortunately, we’re living in 21st century and every PV owner wants to show off their generation on an online app 🤷

The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud - Bert Hubert's writings

Recently a Dutch hacker was able to take control of 4 million solar panel installations (FTM (Dutch), Euractiv, Victor Gevers). And this wasn’t the first time something like this has happened either (PV Magazine). As usual, huge thanks are due to the many beta readers and experts who helped improve this article with their feedback, valuable insights and knowledge! This post was machine translated (not too well) from the original Dutch version, which was also more focused on The Netherlands.

Bert Hubert's writings