There have been plenty of stories about wind turbines bursting into flames. Now it seems solar farms are fire hazards too says the Australian, and in more ways than one:
Victoria’s energy safety regulator has ordered five solar farms to be switched off due to concerns over bushfire risks caused by uncontrolled vegetation.
Operators of the five solar farms owned by subsidiaries of Chinese-owned Sungrow Power Australia have been ordered to cease generating electricity from sites at Raywood and Goornong, near Bendigo; Stawell and Ledcourt in western Victoria and Moolort, west of Castlemaine, after a blitz by Energy Safe Victoria in February.
A spokesperson said the inspections coincided with a fire breaking out at the Raywood solar farm, 28km north of Bendigo, which started in electrical equipment and spread to vegetation on the site.
“When Energy Safe officers attended the scene, they observed a lack of adequate vegetation management including insufficient fire breaks and vegetation that had grown too high,’’ the regulator said.
The fire, which started in an inverter, sent black toxic smoke drifting over the small town of Raywood, causing authorities to issue warnings to residents and causing difficulty for crews trying to access the fire site.
The incident isn’t an isolated one:
Energy Safe CEO Leanne Hughson said energy businesses must prioritise safety and ensure their installations do not endanger the community.
“At the beginning of summer last year, we wrote to the operators of all solar farms in Victoria to ensure they were actively managing safety risks during the fire danger period,” Ms Hughson said.
“Solar farm owners and operators have a legal duty to minimise bushfire risks and if they don’t, we will take action to protect people and property.”
She said safety officers were inspecting other renewable energy facilities in Victoria to ensure they complied with their maintenance and safety obligations.
The Raywood fire is not the first to ignite in a solar farm. An inverter in a shipping container burst into flames at Mannum east of Adelaide in 2024, causing $250,000 damage and injuring a contractor. CFS crews contained the fire to the shipping container and stopped it spreading to nearby panels.
A solar farm near Gulgong, north of Mudgee in the central-west region of NSW, was temporarily shut down after a grass fire in 2023.
Worth reading in full.
The knock-on risks from such fires would obviously be less in Britain where bushfires, or anything like them, are a rarity. Nevertheless, the Victoria story shows there’s a lot more to these installations than simply building them and sitting back.
Readers might also be interested to know that Sungrow has a UK arm. According to Wikipedia, Sungrow is ‘”a publicly listed Chinese solar photovoltaic (PV) inverter manufacturing company headquartered in Hefei, Anhui”.
On July 21st 2023 the Australian ran a story about “China’s spy threat to our solar energy grid”, claiming that:
Australia’s fast-growing solar energy grid is being dominated by Chinese firms with links to the Chinese Communist Party, raising fears of the potential for Beijing to sabotage, surveil or disrupt solar energy supplies.
The country’s solar grid is increasingly reliant on ‘smart inverters’ to convert energy from rooftop solar panels into usable electricity for homes and businesses. But new research shows Chinese companies dominate 58% of the Australian inverter market, making the devices, which are internet-connected and can be remotely controlled, potentially vulnerable to any Chinese attempt to target the solar electricity grid.
Under China’s national intelligence laws, the companies supplying these solar inverters could be ordered by Beijing to sabotage, surveil or disrupt power supplies to Australian homes, companies or government.
The two largest suppliers in the Australian solar inverter market, Sydney-based Sungrow and Melbourne-based GoodWe, are Chinese-owned and have links with the Chinese Communist Party.
Sungrow’s major shareholder, Professor Cao Renxian, is also President of the state-run China Voltaic Industry Association, which is required to “adhere to the (CCP) party’s line, principle and policies”.
The Government has said that for Australia to reach its 43% emissions reduction target there will need to be 22,000 500-watt solar panels installed each day and a total of 60 million by 2030.
China already dominates the global production of solar panels, with an 85% market share – a fact that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has previously described as a national security issue.
Moreover, Australia is pushing the market towards smart inverters:
It is the growing reliance on Chinese-produced solar smart inverters that turn direct current (DC) from solar panels into alternating current (AC) for homes and businesses that is causing most concern.
South Australia has mandated the use of smart inverters in all new solar systems, while Victoria will mandate their use from March next year as they gradually become the standard technology for new rooftop solar systems across the country.
Up to a million rooftop solar systems in Australia are expected to use smart inverters within three years. “In about two to three years, I think there will be a critical mass (of controllable smart inverters),” says Grace Young, Chief Innovation Officer with clean tech device company Wattwatchers.
“I can see it becoming quite a serious threat in certain contexts and circumstances if it was done nefariously and, therefore, yes we absolutely have to take it seriously,” Ms Young said.
Also worth reading in full.
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