Higher Costs, Insecure Software? How US Ban on Foreign Inverters Could Hit Solar
But there’s a catch: The FCC will only allow software updates until Jan. The inverter ban, meanwhile, also ensnares robot vacuums.In some good news, the FCC has signaled it’ll revisit the issue in a future rulemaking, suggesting the Jan. 1, 2029, deadline could be extended or even nixed, given that software patches are crucial to keeping all products secure.
- ▪But there’s a catch: The FCC will only allow software updates until Jan.
- ▪The inverter ban, meanwhile, also ensnares robot vacuums.In some good news, the FCC has signaled it’ll revisit the issue in a future rulemaking, suggesting the Jan.
- ▪1, 2029, deadline could be extended or even nixed, given that software patches are crucial to keeping all products secure.
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| Original publisher | PCMag |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcmag.com/news/higher-costs-insecure-software-how-us-ban-on-foreign-inverters-could-hit |
| Publication time | Thu, 06 Aug 26 22:10:48 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-06T22:40:47.562Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-06T22:40:47.562Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
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| Cluster | gPhEZs9teiM4 · 1 stories |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The US’s sudden ban on foreign-made power inverters, which are often used in solar panels, is raising questions about how long they will continue to receive software updates.“I think there is a question of [whether] even existing inverters...reach a state of obsolescence in several years,” says Joe Shangraw, a solar market analyst at the research firm Wood Mackenzie.The ban, announced last week by the FCC, aims to avoid disruption by blocking only new foreign-made inverters, rather than existing models. But there’s a catch: The FCC will only allow software updates until Jan. 1, 2029.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCMag.
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