‘We have no national security’: Paterson warns of China espionage fears in solar power

One of the Albanian government’s key priorities since taking office in 2022 has been climate and energy policy, with efforts full steam ahead to push Australians towards renewable energy sources.

Many homes and businesses have switched to solar panels with millions installed on rooftops across the country.

But there are growing concerns about the safety risks posed by smart inverters, which is a key component used to convert solar power into usable electricity.

Speaking to Sky News Australia on Friday, Senator Paterson explained that these inverters were largely manufactured, supplied and owned by China and that some of the companies producing them had “very close ties” to their government.

“The problem we have is that in Australia, the smart inverters that are being installed every day right now are predominantly made by Chinese companies, including companies like Huawei,” he told First Edition host Peter Stefanovic.

“All of these companies are subject to Chinese intelligence laws, some of them have very close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.”

Referring to front men for these multinational companies, he said: “You understand your obligations to the party, which is to put the interests of the party before everything else, certainly before your own interests and the interests of the country that you might be supplying with these solar inverters.”

Smart inverters use technology to help integrate solar power into a power grid that relies on the Internet to quickly send and receive signals.

Senator Paterson explained that the “danger” lies in the Internet-based aspect of the product, which makes it a fixture of global cyberspace, making it prone to hacking, security breaches, and the ability to be completely sabotaged at the discretion of the Chinese government.

“We are going to find ourselves in a situation where our network is absolutely crawling with these investors with known cybersecurity vulnerabilities,” he said.

“Experts have said that the real danger point comes when these products reach a critical mass, when they take up a significant proportion of our rooftop solar and therefore a significant proportion of our electrical grid.

“Then they could be disrupted by an outside party, by an intelligence agency…and that could not only damage those inverters and that power source, but it would actually damage our grid as a whole and take our grid offline.”

He highlighted that several European nations had moved to get rid of energy imports from “authoritarian power” in their region, Russia, but the Australian government was doing the opposite.

“It appears that we are… doing everything we can to increase our reliance on and increase our confidence in the authoritative power of our region: the Chinese government,” said Senator Paterson.

“Energy security is national security and if we don’t have energy security, we don’t have national security.”

In 2018, Australia implemented a full ban on Beijing-based conglomerate Huawei on the grounds of its unsecured network security and high-risk intelligence affairs.

The monumental blacklisting marked the first of its kind by any government in the world, and Senator Paterson argued that it should have set a precedent for the current Labor government in relation to the energy sector as well.

“On a bipartisan basis for a decade, we all agreed that they (China) could not be trusted as the backbone of our telecommunications industry, and yet we seem to trust them as the backbone of our new energy system,” he said.

Labor has a target of 82 percent renewable energy consumption in Australia by 2030.

However, onshore manufacturing capabilities for solar power parts are extremely limited, both for panels and smart inverters.

As of last year, only one percent of the 60 million solar panels in the country were made domestically, as for the share of smart inverters, more than half are made in China.