Tag Archives: panels

Cyber Attacks Could Target Home Solar Panels to Disrupt Power Grids

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A third of Australian homes feature rooftop solar panels

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Power grids across the globe face an increasing risk of cyberattacks, primarily due to the vulnerabilities inherent in home solar equipment.

With the rise of distributed energy resources like rooftop solar, grids are leaning more heavily on smart inverters that control connections to local power networks.

“While these technologies provide numerous advantages, they also bring forth new operational and cybersecurity hurdles,” says Sid Chau, a researcher at CSIRO, the Australian government’s research institute.

Smart inverters convert the direct current generated by solar panels into the alternating current required by electrical devices. They also optimize energy storage and enable remote monitoring via the Internet.

This web connectivity means that they not only jeopardize home solar installations but can also threaten larger power generation networks, warn Chau and his team.


The team has pinpointed various methods through which smart inverters can be compromised, including exploiting hardware and software vulnerabilities. Hackers can deceive users into granting excessive permissions on connected inverter applications or collaborate with manufacturers to embed malicious code directly into hardware.

Chau and his team modeled the threats stemming solely from Australian inverters, where roughly one-third of residences possess rooftop solar systems. This scenario mirrors certain power grids worldwide where civilian solar installations are becoming increasingly prevalent.

Although such attacks necessitate careful planning and coordination, researchers have discovered that a relatively small number of compromised solar smart inverters can create significant disruptions when vulnerabilities align.

Once a smart inverter is infiltrated, hackers can execute synchronized attacks targeting the broader power grid.

Of particular concern are assaults aimed at the frequency control of the power grid. In regions like Australia and Europe, the grid frequency must maintain around 50 HERTZ. Though safeguards exist, deviations can lead to cascading failures within the power system.

The risk is heightened further by the long lifespan of many inverters, often exceeding 15 years, which allows cybersecurity measures to quickly become outdated.

Chau emphasizes the need for improved monitoring of private inverters so that authorities can promptly address any suspicious activities that arise.

He also advocates for enhanced long-term support for inverter owners and regular compliance checks to guarantee adherence to cybersecurity and maintenance standards.

Zubair Baig from Deakin University in Melbourne stresses the importance of security validation for all imported inverters.

“Since these devices are often not produced domestically, there exists a risk that they might be configured with malware during manufacturing, leading to potential current fluctuations, permanent equipment damage, and even grid failure,” states Baig.

Ernest Foo from Griffith University in Brisbane highlights that Australia’s critical infrastructure is particularly susceptible to cyber threats due to its outdated design and components.

“The increasing integration of distributed solar energy heightens the likelihood of cyberattacks, especially with the evolving use of machine learning and AI,” he adds.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Melting moon dust to create solar panels on the moon

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Boot print on the dusty surface of the moon

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The base of future moons could be powered by solar cells made on-site from the melted moon dust.

Building items on the moon using materials already there is more practical than shipping them from the Earth. when Felix Lang He heard about this idea at the University of Potsdam in Germany and knew what to do right away. “We have to make solar cells like this, we have to make them right away,” he says.

Two years later, Lang’s team built and tested several solar cells that featured lunar dust as an ingredient. Another important component is a crystal called halide perovskite, which contains elements such as lead, bromine, and iodine, as well as long molecules of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen.

The team melted a synthetic version of the lunar regolith, a layer of loose rock and dust that covers the moon, into “Moonglass.” Because they did not refine the regolith, the mungrass was less transparent than traditional solar cells. However, Lang says the team’s best prototype still reached around 12% efficiency. More traditional perovskite solar cells typically reach an efficiency close to 26%. Lang said the computer simulation suggests that his team could reach that number in the future.

In general, researchers agree that perovskite solar cells are superior to more traditional silicon-based devices in both space and Earth. From a lunar perspective, the use of perovskite materials is also attractive. This is because it can be kept very thin and reduces the weight of the material transported on the moon. Team estimates that a solar cell with an area of ​​400 square meters requires only about a kilogram of perovskite. This is an impressive claim, I say Ian Crawford at Birkbeck, University of London.

It is equally important that the regolith does not need to be purified. This means that no special reactor is needed. In fact, Lang says that the large curved mirror and sunlight can create a beam of light that is warm enough to make the mungrass. One of his colleagues has already tested the technology on their university roofs and saw signs of legolith melting, he says.

Nicholas Bennett At the University of Technology, Sydney says that while past research has tried to process the lunar regolith into clear glass, this is the first time that solar cells have been shown to work with fine moonglass instead. The challenge now, he says, is to make a lot of mungrass outside the lab. If successful, such melting techniques could help create other items that the moon base needs, such as tiles, Crawford says.

Michael Duke The Lunar and Planetary Institute states that manufacturing moongrass-based solar cells will require many technological advances, from excavating the legend to connecting individual cells. Still, if a solar plant is established on the moon, there could be a positive knock-on effect. In this future, space-based systems like satellites will need less energy to fire payloads from the moon, allowing solar cells covered in the moon rather than what was created on Earth.

Lang and his colleagues are currently working on increasing the efficiency of solar cells. For example, we know whether choosing iron before using magnets to melt Regolith can improve the quality of mungrass.

Ultimately, they want to expand the process to other dusty residents. “We’re already thinking, ‘Can we make this work on Mars Regolith?”,” says Lang.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Astronomers suggest new technological signal: silicon solar panels

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in New paper Published in Astrophysical JournalDr. Ravi Kopparapu of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and colleagues assessed the detectability of silicon solar panels on Earth-like exoplanets as potential technological signatures.

Conceptual illustration of an exoplanet with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. The structure on the right is an orbiting solar panel array that collects light from the parent star, converts it into electricity and transmits it via microwaves to the surface. The exoplanet on the left shows other potential technological features: on the night side there are city lights (the glowing circular structures), and on the day side there are multi-colored clouds representing various forms of pollution, such as nitrogen dioxide gas from the burning of fossil fuels and chlorofluorocarbons used in refrigeration. Image credit: NASA/Jay Freidlander.

“The search for extraterrestrial life has primarily focused on detecting biosignatures – remote observations of atmospheric or ground-based spectral properties that indicate signs of life on exoplanets,” said Dr Kopparapu and his co-authors.

“Recently, there has been a rise in interest in technosignatures, which refer to observational signs of extraterrestrial technology that can be detected or inferred through astronomical surveys.”

“While the search for extraterrestrial intelligence through radio observations has been popular for decades, recent studies have proposed an alternative: searching for technological signatures in the ultraviolet to mid-infrared spectral range.”

Astronomers speculate that extraterrestrials might build solar panels out of silicon because it is relatively abundant compared to other elements used in solar power generation, such as germanium, gallium, and arsenic.

Silicon is also excellent at converting light emitted by stars like the Sun into electricity, and it is cost-effective to mine and manufacture into solar cells.

The researchers also assume that a hypothetical extraterrestrial civilization would rely solely on solar energy.

However, if other energy sources, such as nuclear fusion, were used, the technological signature of silicon would be diminished, making the civilization even more difficult to detect.

Furthermore, they assume that the population of the civilization will stabilize at some point, and if for some reason this does not happen, they may end up expanding the Eternal Father into deep space.

For the study, scientists used computer models and NASA satellite data to simulate Earth-like planets with different degrees of silicon solar panel coverage.

They then modeled an advanced telescope, like NASA’s proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory, to see if it could detect the solar panels of a planet about 30 light-years away, a relatively close galaxy that is more than 100,000 light-years across.

The researchers found that hundreds of hours of observation time would be required with this type of telescope to detect signals from solar panels covering about 23% of the land area of ​​an Earth-like exoplanet.

However, the solar panel coverage needed to support 30 billion people with a high standard of living was only around 8.9%.

“We find that even if the current population of around 8 billion were to stabilise to a high standard of living of 30 billion and run solely on solar energy for power, it would still use far less energy than the total amount of sunlight illuminating the Earth,” Dr Kopparap said.

The research has implications on the Fermi Paradox, proposed by physicist Enrico Fermi, which asks why extraterrestrial civilizations have not spread across the galaxy by now, given that our own Milky Way galaxy is ancient and vast, making interstellar travel difficult but possible.

“This suggests that if a civilisation chooses a very high standard of living, it may not feel the need to expand across the galaxy because it can achieve sustainable population and energy use levels,” Dr Kopparap said.

“They may expand within their own star system, or neighboring star systems, but there may not be a galaxy-wide civilization.”

“Furthermore, our own technological expertise may not yet be able to predict what more advanced civilizations will be able to achieve.”

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Ravi Kopparap others2024. Detectability of Solar Panels as a Technology Signature. ApJ 967, 119; doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/ad43d7

This article is based on a press release provided by NASA.

Source: www.sci.news