Highlights

• Chinese manufacturers, led by Huawei and Sungrow, dominate Europe's solar inverter market with 9 of the top 10 suppliers controlling over 200 GW of capacity.
• Networked inverters with undocumented communication modules could theoretically disrupt Europe's energy grid through coordinated remote attacks.
• Europe risks repeating its rare earth dependency pattern by relying on Chinese power electronics, semiconductors, and critical minerals for its green transition.

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Europe’s rapid solar rollout has created a paradox: while rooftops and fields now bristle with panels, the digital “brains” that connect them to the grid are overwhelmingly made in China. Tobias Gehrke, a senior policy (opens in a new tab) fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (opens in a new tab) (ECFR), warns that Chinese-made inverters – especially from Huawei, now the world’s largest supplier – sit behind more than 200 GW of European solar capacity, and could in theory be used to disrupt the grid at scale. His argument: unless Europe develops a “5G-style toolbox” to exclude high-risk vendors, it is sleepwalking into a new energy-security crisis.

Silicon Nerves, Political Leverage

Gehrke is on firm ground in describing Chinese dominance in inverters and clean-tech exports. Independent data from Wood Mackenzie and others confirm that nine of the top ten inverter makers are Chinese, with Huawei and Sungrow leading and shipping hundreds of gigawatts globally, including deep penetration into Europe. Recent U.S. investigations have also found undocumented communication modules in some Chinese inverters, underlining that cybersecurity risks are not imaginary.

Where the piece moves from evidence to scenario planning is the headline claim that China “could crash Europe’s energy grid”. There is no public proof of an actual kill-switch plot, only a plausible vulnerability: remotely updateable, networked devices supplied by firms subject to China’s National Intelligence Law. The blackout story used as a narrative hook is hypothetical, but it effectively illustrates how a few gigawatts of coordinated disruption at critical nodes could cascade through a stressed grid.

Rare Earths, Inverters and the Next Dependency Fight

For Rare Earth Exchanges readers, the deeper message is systemic:

• Europe risks replicating the rare earth pattern – relying on Chinese hardware and software for the power electronics that manage its green transition.
• If Europe tightens rules on “high-risk” vendors, we could see new demand for trusted, non-Chinese inverter and grid-equipment supply chains, with knock-on effects for rare earth magnets, power semiconductors, and related critical minerals.
• The commentary carries a clear normative tilt: China is cast as an untrustworthy actor, while European industrial policy is urged to be more interventionist. That bias is transparent, not hidden, and largely aligned with emerging political debates in Brussels over Chinese clean-tech overdependence.

For now, the article is alarm-raising, not misinformation: the technical dependency is real; the catastrophic “grid crash” remains a warning shot, not a forecast.

Citation: Tobias Gehrke, “How China could crash Europe’s energy grid and what the EU can do about it,” European Council on Foreign Relations, 20

November 2025.European Council on Foreign Relations (opens in a new tab)

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