In May 2021, the cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline made headlines across the country. After Colonial shut down their pipelines, gasoline shortages rapidly drove up the price of gasoline and spurred panic buying at fuel stations, particularly across hard-hit southern states. With cyberattacks on energy infrastructure increasing in frequency and severity, many are starting to wonder: what else could be at risk?

Unfortunately, the energy sector has already seen serious cyberattacks in the past–which could be an indicator of future risk. In 2015, Ukraine experienced the first known cyberattack on the power grid, which caused outages at 30 substations throughout the country and left about 230,000 people without electricity for up to six hours. People with solar-plus-storage systems would typically have the benefit of grid resiliency in such a situation and would be able to keep the power running–however, solar systems are not entirely immune to the risk of cyberattacks without proper protections.