There are almost 860,000 solar installations in Flanders against "barely" 150,000 in Wallonia and some 15,000 in Brussels. At peak production, this accumulated Belgian solar park produces more power than five large nuclear reactors. At present no Flemish authority has any insight into the devices that power this mass of solar energy: the inverters. These increasingly come from China as emerged from a survey conducted by VRTN News, but also from a preliminary count by grid operator Fluvius.
Climate & Environment
Can the Chinese disrupt Belgium’s solar energy production at will?
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Neither the Flemish energy watchdog VREG, nor the energy administration VEKA, nor the Flemish distribution system operator Fluvius, nor the office of Flemish energy minister Zuhal Demir (nationalist) could tell us more about the origin of solar inverters installed in Flanders.
Fluvius keeps accurate records of every solar installation to ensure the safety of the power grid. Anyone who puts even one solar panel on their roof has to couple it with an inverter and register it with Fluvius after it has undergone a technical inspection. Fluvius keeps no figures on the origin of the devices, even though the manufacturer is always mentioned during the inspection.
Number of Chinese inverters of strategic importance
Distribution system operator Fluvius finally came up with figures late last night at the request of energy minister Demir: in the past six months, 100,000 new inverters were added in Flanders. More than half of them were Chinese. These figures are not official and they don't say that much. There are large but also small inverters. Some convert a lot of power, others far less: as long as we don't have the figures on the total amount of power that pass via Chinese inverters, we don't have a picture of their share in Flemish solar energy.
This mass of inverters is growing in importance. By our rough estimate, there are already over a million of them in Flanders alone. And they control a source of electricity that, on sunny afternoons, supplies most of the power in our country. According to the databases of Europe's high-voltage grid operators for Europe as a whole, at times this is already more power than 110 large nuclear reactors.
In Belgium, power production from solar panels already exceeded the 5,000 megawatt (MW) mark several times this year. This is as much as five large nuclear reactors: the current Belgian nuclear power park can still supply a maximum of just under 4,000 megawatts of power. All this means that on sunny afternoons, our solar plants form the largest power plant in Belgium.
Figures from grid operator Fluvius now show that more than 50% of the 100,000 inverters installed since May come from China. It is an indication that Chinese manufacturers currently dominate the Flemish market. It’s a dominance that worries some of our installers: many point to the ease with which they themselves can switch off inverters remotely, via software platforms provided to them by the manufacturers themselves. Several installers agree that China could potentially use this method to disrupt our electricity grid some time in the future and in this way exert pressure on Belgium.