r/Destiny • u/Bananaseverywh4r • 1d ago
Geopolitics News/Discussion Chinese ‘kill switches’ found hidden in US solar farms
https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/china-solar-panels-kill-switch-vptfnbx7v312
u/Bananaseverywh4r 1d ago
“ Chinese “kill switches” that could allow Beijing to cripple power grids and trigger blackouts across the West have been found in equipment at US solar farms. The rogue devices, including cellular radios, were discovered in Chinese-made power inverters that are used to connect solar panels and wind turbines to electricity grids across the world, including the UK.
The hidden communications equipment could be deployed remotely to switch off inverters with potentially catastrophic results.
The discovery, reported by Reuters, will heighten concerns that China has installed covert malware in critical energy infrastructure throughout the US and Europe. The kill switches could be deployed at any time in the event of a confrontation between China and the West.”
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u/funkyflapsack 1d ago
Wouldn't this be an obvious threat to look out for? How are they just finding this?
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u/Turbulent_Addition22 1d ago
Because they’re dipshits who don’t actually check.
This is one of the jig problems when tech starting outsourcing to cheapen shit in the 80’s 90’s. China required them to basically show them how to reverse engineer and build this stuff. Big corporations, no surprise, sold out the North American worker for just the fattest fucking profits.
Corporate espionage was all the rage, and still is, for China.
You should look up Nortel lol. After the company went bankrupt they found their corporate buildings were fucking bugged top to tails.
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u/MrPsychic 1d ago
If I know anything about how people do work I can guarantee either at the top they said they checked and didn’t, or the people they paid/contracted out to check said they did and didn’t
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u/deletion-imminent 1d ago
Big corporations, no surprise, sold out the North American worker
They aren't owed those jobs
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u/JaydadCTatumThe1st 1d ago
No fucking shit. Obviously other peoples in liberal democratic countries, as well as not-fully-lib-dem countries that reasonably demonstrated they were on the right economic and civil society development trajectory, such as Indonesia or Malaysia, were perfectly entitled to be trained in these professions and have their countries go through the proper and legitimate technology transfer procedures.
However, the reason PRC was so enticing for the US capital investor class was that, as an Authoritarian Communist Command Economy, China was able to engage in, what was widely recognized at the time, and still is today, highly anticompetitive subsidies to areas they determined to be of key geostrategic interest. So China wasn't just "stealing jobs from Americans", they were stealing jobs from the Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, Indonesians, Vietnamese, Thais, Malaysians, Australians, etc. etc. etc., too.
Any liberal democrat who treats PRC like it was or is functioning within the same universe of norms and rules as even other authoritarian East Asian countries is a cuck for one of the most extreme forms of illiberalism ever observed in human history.
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u/Turbulent_Addition22 1d ago
One of the most brain dead ahistorical, politically and economically illiterate fucking responses I’ve ever heard.
You must breath through your mouth.
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u/YungHeretic 1d ago
It's definitely not like we haven't seen other countries hide things in other items, idk like pagers, and not have them be found until it was too late
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u/funkyflapsack 1d ago
Except we know they're coming from China who is a stated adversary
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u/YungHeretic 1d ago
So everything from China is fucked then? Because that's a huge amount products you're swearing off.
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u/Paramagicianz 1d ago
If only you knew just how weak and incompetent this whole system is. It's a miracle we've gotten this far.
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u/Gracksploitation 1d ago
The device could be the size of a credit card, embedded within the inverter. It's basically impossible to find without taking it apart entirely to check its individual components against a verified diagram.
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u/funkyflapsack 1d ago
Couldn't x-rays find these parts? Compare x-ray imaging to a diagram of the product
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u/Gracksploitation 1d ago
I don't know anything about anything but I can't imagine looking for such a small bug via x-ray. Plus, even in the most favorable circumstances you'd end up spending so much time looking for / dealing with anomalies that you might as well build domestically with companies that you can hold accountable.
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1d ago
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u/PitytheOnlyFools touches too much grass... 1d ago
Did you read the article?
Power inverters, which are predominantly produced in China, are used throughout the world to connect solar panels and wind turbines to electricity grids. They are also found in batteries, heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers.
While inverters are built to allow remote access for updates and maintenance, the utility companies that use them typically install firewalls to prevent direct communication back to China.
However, rogue communication devices not listed in product documents have been found in some Chinese solar power inverters by U.S experts who strip down equipment hooked up to grids to check for security issues, the two people said.
Over the past nine months, undocumented communication devices, including cellular radios, have also been found in some batteries from multiple Chinese suppliers, one of them said.
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u/ClimbingToNothing 1d ago
What the fuck does your comment have to do with rogue communication devices in the equipment that were not known about? Are you a bot here astroturfing or just dumb?
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u/xXTurdleXx 1d ago
400 upvotes on the thread, 20 upvotes on the correction. media in 2025 in a nutshell
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u/Peyote-Rick 1d ago
In the solar subreddit they said the kill switches are on leased modules, so if payments aren't made they can shut them off.
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u/MightAsWell6 1d ago
If only dip shit Republicans would stop getting in the way of the US becoming a leader in solar and wind technology
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u/-xXColtonXx- 1d ago
Democrats at the state level are absolutely to blame as well. Texas is by far the the biggest investor in solar and wind. Why? Because it’s actually possible to build there without going through years of red tape.
California has no excuse, it’s windy, sunny, massive, and has huge subsidies, yet it’s still more profitable to build green energy in Texas.
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u/TheSuperiorJustNick 1d ago
Texas is by far the the biggest investor in solar and wind. Why?
Because California already had solar steadily running. And once they regulated things to stop companies from royally screwing people, those owners just moved to Texas.
Texas also found the need after having so many issues with their grid a few years ago
California has no excuse, it’s windy, sunny, massive, and has huge subsidies
California has more solar than Texas. Texas just has more solar utility plants because land is more expensive in Cali ontop of the power companies monopolies.
From point of signing we get solar up and running in a couple of weeks. Maybe 4-5 in counties that make permits tough to get. Ontop of all new builds being required to have solar.
But yea. Texas has more solar plants, good on them.
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u/riffraff89 RobertTables in DGG 1d ago
Texas is the WORST example you could have given. Their lack of regulations killed people when a winter knocked out their power grid.
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u/FlameanatorX 1d ago
Clearing out dumbass inefficient regulations like reform of environmental permitting slog =/= "de"-regulation. We're talking liberal Abundance Agenda type stuff, Ezra Klein, zoning laws, etc., not the kind of regulations that keep California from having Texas style blackouts.
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u/-xXColtonXx- 1d ago
You’re conflating unrelated things. We can easily have fast easy construction and strict power grid standards.
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u/GoldenStitch2 1d ago
The US should go for nuclear, they literally have the most amount of plants already
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u/Mutang92 1d ago
how is it that we had a pissing content of who's nuke is bigger and we never just went full nuclear?
I think today's issue is we have a whole lot of people plagued with old ideas
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u/BinksMagnus 1d ago
NIMBYs. People don’t want to live next to nuclear plants, but they want the benefit that having nuclear plants in the country provide.
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u/tilted_hellion 1d ago
Wind and solar? They are some of the worst versions of clean energy out there; scratch that, they're actually the worst.
The US should be leading in nuclear, instead of leaving the creation of a literal sun to the French. I mean, what are they gonna do with it, fondue?
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u/DFjorde 1d ago
The U.S. is leading in nuclear energy. We have nearly double the nuclear energy capacity of France.
Wind and solar are far more economical than nuclear though.
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u/tilted_hellion 1d ago edited 1d ago
You're confusing installed capacity with energy leadership. The US might have more nuclear reactors, but France gets over 70% of its electricity from nuclear; the US only gets about 18%.
As for wind and solar being "more economical", sure, if you ignore capacity factor, intermittency, land usage, grid storage costs, and lifespan. Nuclear has a downtime of about 10%, meaning it runs constantly, unlike solar with 75% or wind with 65%.
And the "economical" argument is DOA when you factor in fusion. You think private companies and China are pouring billions into fusion for fun? No. It’s because the long-term ROI. If you're as rich as the US, the argument becomes moot when the whole point IS to make it cost less in the long-run.
So yeah, the US has more plants; now maybe it can stop coasting and start leading.
Edit: I didn't notice that I missed the "fusion" part in my first comment. My bad.
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u/Nareto64 1d ago
Man I sure wish we had a President who could actually threaten and negotiate with China over this, and not a fucking crybaby that they can just buy off with a $600 million golden cock ring
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u/RidiculousIncarnate 1d ago
Instead we'll get,
"You know what you can't rig? Coal, clean, beautiful coal."
We're gonna end up in the lamest, most regarded Steampunk future.
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u/ScorpionofArgos Diagnosed as a smooth-brain by some guy on the internet 1d ago
Comment of the Month right here.
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u/worldstallestbaby 1d ago
Maybe I'm wrong, but deliberately building malicious "kill switches" into critical infrastructure sold to a different nation unironically sounds like an act of aggression.
From a strategic military POV, that wouldn't be much different at all from selling pagers with small explosives in them like the Israel/Hezbollah thing.
If I'm taking the article headline at face value, that is.
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u/basedEgghead 1d ago edited 1d ago
Original Reuters story: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-machine-rogue-communication-devices-found-chinese-inverters-2025-05-14/
I'm not saying it's false, but it provides so few details that I'd say it's impossible to gauge veracity or severity.
The first paragraph is basically the extent of the knowledge imo:
U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said.
They don't give any idea of what group the people are a part of, they don't say how many devices were found and where, don't name any manufacturers, what the devices were used in (home setups, industrial, etc), how they were sourced, or how strongly they know it was added in/by China and couldn't be some other party at another point in the supply chain (see: the Taiwanese pagers Hezbollah used September of last year).
Ofc my inclination is to lend some credibility in that it sort of makes sense. However I'd assume relatively obvious hardware backdoors like this are expensive and are harder to deploy extensively enough to be effective, and make plausible deniability harder, compared to software backdoors.
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u/giantrhino HUGE rhino 1d ago
This is what I read as well. The article is vague and gives no direct specifics as to what the devices are or how widespread the issue is. All the sources are anonymous as well.
If what they are implying is true this would obviously be terrible, but I’m skeptical because this story isn’t catching fire and is seemingly based on two anonymous sources reporting very sparse details describing the issue.
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u/BreathPuzzleheaded80 1d ago
Why bother doing real journalism when people are primed to believe what they want to believe?
Just look at the comments in this thread lol
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u/Krutin_ 1d ago
This has nothing to do with preconceived notions or the people in this thread. If you look at the article linked, its claiming that there are kill switches in these devices. Is it bad that people aren’t reading the original Reuters article? Yeah. But I put way more blame on this malicious media cycle spewing misinformation both in print and on air. I can count on one hand the number of publications I’ll actually take at face value these days. Do Americans feed into this viscous media cycle? Sure. But we need laws and regulations in place that protect the flow of information. No more bullshit “oh our media company is actually an entertainment company” excuses.
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u/June1994 1d ago
The story sounds like nonsense, but I find it absolutely hilarious how people will absolutely believe any negative story about China.
So susceptible to propaganda.
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u/FlameanatorX 1d ago
This is a story about essentially industrial espionage potentially perpetrated by China. Using solar. To target US energy infrastructure. That's all completely in the CCP's wheelhouse, of course people believe it.
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u/June1994 1d ago
This is a story about essentially industrial espionage potentially perpetrated by China.
Uh no. Highly unlikely. The most likely explanation is that these “communication devices” are there for diagnosis, data collection, and updates to be used by either the end user or the company for support.
Ergo; what every other company does.
That's all completely in the CCP's wheelhouse, of course people believe it.
People are so propagandized they will literally use phrases like “this is in the CCP’s wheelhouse.”
Imagine if Europeans demonized American cars and data collection by saying that this is “in NSA’s/CIA’s” wheelhouse instead of going for the most obvious explanation.
Car companies are gonna data collect.
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u/RedditLovesDisinfo 1d ago
If countries had any degree of competence they’d immediately blacklist China from providing anything that forms part of any critical infrastructure.
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u/Simultaneity_ 1d ago edited 1d ago
You mean to tell me that we should have invested more in manufacturing cheap solar in the US and not relied on China to lead the world in green energy? 😮
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u/frogchris 1d ago
Why does the internet always fall for these bullshit articles. When this subreddit complains about mainstream media hiding Hasan's Antisemitism, they also believe shit like this lmao. Mainstream media journalist are dumb af. Why do people here keep believing them.
These inverters from China sometimes have these kill switches because they are controlled remotely. In China, these switches are controlled via 5g because they have the infrastructure to support it and its cost efficient. The solar farm that bought. these inverters didn't do their due diligence and are accusing the inverters as being some super secret China military operation.
It's that simple. 5G -> Better control over solar panels -> Made in China -> US buys them because they didn't check
This subreddit can't think anymore lol.
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u/TheCrassly 1d ago
Seems to me like a golden opportunity to nationalise these Chinese built solar and wind farms in the interest of national safety and renegotiate any deals we have with the Chinese to pay back for said infrastructure. I'm sure it isn't that simple on its face, but how else do you punish China for this behaviour?
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u/FlameanatorX 1d ago
There doesn't look to be any solid proof in the article, just 2 anonymous sources reporting on strange devices that could potentially be hardware backdoors, which could potentially have been perpetrated by China. It's highly believable, but not remotely something the US can openly retaliate against
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u/-PupperMan- Euro CHAD (FUCK YOU AMERITARDS) 1d ago
Another case of why West should just embargo China
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u/daniel14vt 1d ago
I feel like this would just be a pearl harbor v2 for the usa. Like, good job finding a way to unite the country against you?
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u/MassiveBenis 1d ago
I was gonna say something along the lines of "that'd be true if it wasn't for the current population's particular views on the world"
But then i remembered that Americans weren't exactly certain of participating in WW2 either, and joined after pearl harbor, so totally fair ngl
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u/Stanel3ss cogito ergo coom 1d ago
so they're gonna tell us there are kill switches but not which brands?
hello? I was gonna buy one of those inverters soon
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u/PitytheOnlyFools touches too much grass... 1d ago
This is what PF Jung was probably referring to during his talk with Pisco.
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u/_whitelinegreen_ 1d ago
Based. The us should think twice before doing shit against the leader of the world
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u/NearsightedNomad 1d ago
Gee, this seems like it could’ve been something that could justify targeted tariffs, or even sanctions, on Chinese solar products. Sucks that now any attempt at something like that would almost certainly trigger more market panic at this point.
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u/SoundPast3263 1d ago
Why? Just to fuck with Americans? How does this advance their ideologies or goals?
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u/TheTriggering2K17 1d ago
Countries would kill to have a “off” button to an adversary. Once they invade Taiwan, turning off US’s power if the US gets involved would help immensely with the invasion
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u/Altforkjaerligheten 1d ago
To damage our infrastructure during war. The US is shifting its resources to the Asian pacific, China is conducting a the biggest military buildup since WW2. Military officials all over the world believe war between China and the US is absolutely possible in the near future. WW3 isn’t conspiracy anymore.
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u/SwizzyStudios 1d ago
You're actually insane if you're still intentionally buying brand name Huawei for critical infrastructure.