Opinion by Eric Levesque: “Chinese green tech is a national security nightmare – we need to act before the lights go out”

Strider President and Co-Founder Eric Levesque wrote an opinion for LBC about how Britain risks becoming a backdoor for Chinese tech to re-enter the European market.

Last month, the European Commission moved to block public funding for solar panel inverters from what it calls “high-risk vendors,” a category that squarely targets China’s technology giants, including Huawei.

Inverters are used in a range of energy systems, but in solar power, they are essential. It is a device that converts direct current into alternating current, the form of electricity used by the grid and by most homes, hospitals, and factories. They are also connected to the internet and can be monitored, updated, and, in some configurations, controlled remotely.

The Commission’s spokesperson was surprisingly direct about why. Foreign actors, she warned, could use inverters to manipulate energy networks and gain “unauthorised access to operational data.” She did not soften what that disruption could look like – the manipulation of electricity production, and the capability of a “remote shutdown… leading to countrywide blackouts.”

Huawei is among the vendors named in Brussels as high-risk, and British readers will remember the 2020 decision to remove the company from the UK’s 5G communications network. The concern then was straightforward; a company with deep ties to the Chinese state had no place in sensitive national infrastructure. That argument won, but Huawei never left the energy sector. As of 2022 it held a 26 per cent share of the European solar inverter market and has since struck deals with UK energy companies.

As Britain accelerates towards clean electricity by 2030, more and more inverters are entering our system from China. Imports of converters into the UK, Norway and Switzerland grew from 256 million kilograms in 2015 to 395 million kilograms in 2023. We are talking about a structural dependency embedded across the entire system.

At Strider, we have been analysing this issue for some time, and specifically at the pattern of Chinese state interest in exactly this kind of infrastructure. In 2020, researchers from the State Grid Corporation of China and the China Electric Power Research Institute, both state-linked institutions, published a detailed technical analysis of the blackout that struck the United Kingdom on 9 August 2019. They were studying the oscillations caused by UK wind farms and theorising how similar failures might be triggered by other renewable energy sources.

China’s researchers are mapping our vulnerabilities whilst China’s manufacturers become increasingly embedded in our infrastructure. The European Commission has now accepted, in plain language, that this combination represents a credible threat.

Which brings us to the particular challenge Britain now faces. When the EU restricts public funding from high-risk vendors in its energy infrastructure, displaced supply does not simply disappear. Manufacturers who can no longer access European public contracts will look for alternative routes to market. Britain, sitting outside the EU’s regulatory framework, risks becoming exactly that alternative route, a backdoor through which Chinese inverter technology re-enters European supply chains.

The good news is that the UK is well placed to respond. Britain has shown genuine leadership on economic security in recent years, from research security guidance to investment screening, and there is real appetite in government and across industry to go further. We now need to audit what is already embedded in the national grid, and close the backdoor: none of this is radical. It is the logical extension of work already underway.

The opportunity to get ahead of this is still open. It will not remain so indefinitely.