The European Commission is blocking EU funding for solar panel inverters from what it considers high-risk vendors like China’s tech giant Huawei, it confirmed Monday.
Commission spokesperson Siobhan McGarry told reporters the EU executive has decided to take “concrete action right now” against the “risk of disruption of the EU’s critical infrastructure by foreign actors,” including by “developing guidance on restricting the use of EU funds for projects involving inverters from high-risk suppliers.”
High-risk vendors already involved in EU-funded projects can ask for an exception, an EU official said, and the Commission will decide by Nov. 1 whether to allow the projects to continue without restrictions on which suppliers they can use. The official was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Inverters are a piece of technology that turns solar panels’ electricity into current that flows into the grid. Huawei is a market leader in the technology.
