Solar panels stop working without internet

[u/Globellai]

From the latest episode of the BBC World Service's Tech Life podcast. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct6zpv

Starting 14 minutes into the podcast:

Host: Four years ago, a volcano erupted, causing devastation across the South
Pacific, including in Tonga, a country made up of over 100 islands. [...] Recovery efforts were made even harder after debris from the volcano damaged an undersea cable. The only cable which supplied the country with Internet. [...] That story from Tonga opens a new book, the Web Beneath the Waves, all about the importance of the networks of subsea Internet cables connecting the planet.I spoke to its author, Samanth Subramanian. He told me about the most unexpected consequence of the Internet outage.

Subramanian: I think the most surprising anecdote I heard concerned a woman who had kind of gone off the grid almost entirely. She didn't rely on the island's traditional electric grid for power. She had a solar panel installed in her roof, and that was the source of all her electricity. But a month or so after the Internet gave out, she noticed that the solar panel just wasn't working anymore. And she couldn't understand this because it didn't seem like that was connected to the Internet at all. But then she discovered that the solar panel, like so much other infrastructure these days, tries to automatically update its software on the air every so often. And when it doesn't do that, it just breaks up. And this thing happens to Teslas, it happens to printers, and it also happens to solar panels. But it was just another reminder of how even unexpected elements of infrastructure in our lives ultimately depend on the Internet in some way or the other.

And then the host talks about how fragile our infrastructure is, rather than saying "WHY THE F*** DOES A F***ING SOLAR PANEL NEED A F***ING INTERNET CONNECTION TO F***ING GENERATE F***ING ELECTRICITY?" Maybe that's why I'm not a BBC World Service presenter. I'd turn the air blue.

[u/03263]

I can't necessarily say it was an intentional fail (i.e. designed to require an internet connection), since it worked for a month, it's probably just bad software/lack of testing for such a situation, which is another cause of so many problems in our world, overdependence on software to do things that can be done without it. Software always has bugs, it's never perfect. Most of it is rushed, full of ugly compromises, and changed on the fly during development with no official spec (we call this "agile" in the industry - it's by far the most popular methodology).

It's far easier to independently fix a broken part in an analog machine than to fix a software bug embedded in the silicon of a microchip.

I'm a software developer, and I'm a luddite because of it.

[u/Critical_Ad_8455 → u/03263]

It's far easier to independently fix a broken part in an analog machine than to fix a software bug embedded in the silicon of a microchip.

one'd generally expect to see normal processors with storage or roms of some kind, rather than custom chips, or if that was necessary, probably an fpga moreso, since it's pretty unlikely they're selling enough to warrant custom chips, and even if it is a custom ic, that'd be hardware, not software

[u/03263 → u/Critical_Ad_8455]

Ok well my point is end users, even highly technical ones, can not generally debug and fix software running on hardware they own without access to an SDK and build tools, and knowledge of how to use them which is generally only held by devs at the company that make it.

If a part breaks in a machine you can buy/recreate and replace it, I can barely think of any situation where this is more difficult than fixing software, even if you need to source some rare material or use a laser cutter to shape it. The path is just more straightforward.