Just in case you’re actually worried:
- Politico was bought by Axel Springer of which the single biggest shareholder is KKR, a company heavily invested in fossil energy
- We’re only talking about 16 chinese windmills
So you’re saying the headline is blown out of proportion?
Imagine if the Chinese put them into reverse and blew everything away
Then they’d be a little fan club.
That would suck electricity out of the grid!
Stop. Please don’t make me imagine such a thing any further. I can only take so much.
It feels like Chinese windmills with backdoor controls from the Chinese government is both a crazy idea and pretty easily solved. Just rip out and replace whatever remote control system is in it. Unless it’s wired to a bomb, worst case scenario they shut it down while you manually restart them.
Though it’s not quite that simple, it should be.
Grid tie equipment has to be carefully controlled to not cause worse problems down the line, but it only takes experienced and knowledgeable controls engineers to work out what programming is needed and make/install a system to do that. It’s not something completely impossible or something only the Chinese can do.
Its all cloud connected shitware yeah. If you rip out the spyware it will stop working or wont spit out any monitoring data.
The same with chinese grid tie solar inverters btw. You can disconnect those from the internet but consumers dont do that because they want the cloud monitoring and have no clue.99% of people dont know how to make a custom influxdb + grafana setup.
even if somehow these windmills need regular maintenance by Chinese operators, there’s still an easy solution: 1. put all the management endpoints into an isolated network where they can be accessed from a jumpbox; 2. provide access under escort, so German proctors are monitoring the session and can pause it at any time. extremely noncredible!