Research
The Solar Immune System.
Active R&D · in progress
The largest power station in Australia does not appear on any map. It is millions of rooftops, and nobody secures it like one. This is research into how we keep the solar edge running when it becomes a target, by giving the whole fleet something it has never had: an immune system.
Rooftop solar has quietly become critical infrastructure. Australia is heading past forty gigawatts of it, toward a future where close to half of all electricity comes from consumer energy resources: household solar, home batteries, and the inverters that tie them to the grid.
Here is the strange part. A single generator of thirty megawatts or more, connected to the wholesale market, is captured by the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act. It has to register, run a risk program, and report incidents. Ten million homes that together dwarf that generator are captured by none of it. The threshold was written for big iron in one place, not for a fleet spread across every suburb.
The attack surface
Every panel is now a small computer online.
The SolarEdge and Solplanet units on roofs across the country, and every brand beside them, are managed remotely by design. That convenience is also the exposure.
A 2025 study found dozens of high-severity vulnerabilities across major inverter brands: hijacking accounts, pushing unsigned firmware, and controlling whole fleets of devices at once.
Investigators have reported undocumented communication modules, including hidden cellular radios, inside inverters and batteries, capable of reaching the hardware around a firewall.
This is not only theory. Solar inverters have already been switched off remotely from overseas, in more than one country at once.
You do not need to break into ten million homes. You need one vendor cloud, one common firmware, or one supply chain.
Flip a large enough slice of the fleet at the same instant, in a heatwave or an evening peak, and the grid frequency lurches. Research suggests a surprisingly small share of distributed solar, acting in concert, is enough to matter. So ask the uncomfortable question: if a bad actor shut down a large enough portion of the country’s rooftop inverters and batteries at once, could the rest of the system pick up the slack fast enough to keep the lights on? And who would be accountable, when no single owner is large enough to be regulated?
It gets sharper. To manage all this solar, operators are already moving to mandate a remote off switch of their own: the ability to curtail or disconnect rooftop systems when the grid needs it. We are building the very capability an attacker wants, for good reasons, and calling it grid management. Securing it is no longer optional. The question stops being whether these systems can be controlled remotely, and becomes who gets to, and how we would know if someone else did.
The scenario, running
Watch the grid lose the load.
A compromise does not need to reach every home. It needs enough of them at the same moment.
The answer · the immune response
You cannot regulate ten million homes. You can immunise them.
Borrowed from biology, applied to hardware. Five functions, one living system, each stage feeding the next.
- 01
Sense / the nervous system
Every installation reports its own vitals and behaviour in real time: generation, storage, inverter health, and the commands it is being asked to run. You cannot defend what you cannot see.
- 02
Detect / recognising the threat
Models learn each site’s normal rhythm, then flag what does not belong. A failing panel, a silent battery fault, or a shutdown command that no legitimate operator should ever be sending.
- 03
Respond / the immune response
The site acts locally, inside guardrails set in advance: refuse the suspicious instruction, isolate, ride through, or raise a human. Fast, bounded, and answerable to the owner, not a distant cloud.
- 04
Remember / immune memory
Every incident becomes a signature the fleet keeps. The second time a pattern appears it is caught sooner and handled with less drama. The network gets harder to surprise.
- 05
Share / herd immunity
A threat seen at one installation becomes an antibody for all of them. An attack that depends on hitting thousands of identical targets at the same moment stops working when the fleet can recognise it and refuse together.
Why this sits here
It is every pillar at once.
The Solar Immune System is not a side project. It is what happens when security, AI, cloud and digital are pointed at the same real problem.
Security
At its heart this is threat detection and response for hardware that has become critical infrastructure. Energy devices are attack surface now, and they deserve a zero-trust posture like anything else.
AI
The pattern recognition that separates a healthy day from an early warning, and the judgement to refuse a bad command without waiting for a human on every one.
Cloud
The backbone that carries telemetry off the edge, coordinates a fleet, and holds the shared memory that makes herd immunity possible.
Digital
The dashboards and interfaces that make all of it legible, so an owner can see what their system saw and why it did what it did.
Where this is now
Early, honest, and hands on.
Building the sensing and detection layers: the telemetry backbone, and teaching models what a healthy system looks like so the abnormal, and the malicious, stand out.
Bounded local response that can refuse a hostile command, then the shared memory that turns one site’s lesson into the whole fleet’s defence.
How much autonomy is safe to hand a device, how to share what one site learns without sharing what one site owns, and where regulation should meet the edge.
This is bigger than one workshop.
If you build in solar, energy, security or policy, I would genuinely like to compare notes. The grid edge is safer worked on in the open than left quiet.