An internet intelligence company in The Hague revealed on Tuesday 6 October that it could reach the control systems of more than 8,500 wind and solar parks in 35 European countries.
Researchers at Modat counted 8,547 reachable systems, 132 of them at solar parks and nine at wind parks in the Netherlands.
Such systems are not meant to be reachable straight from the internet, where they become an easy target for intruders.
Almost 67% of the exposed wind park systems were in Germany and Italy, and Spain held 2,766 of the 7,942 solar park systems.
Ethical hacker Soufian El Yadmani said that on some systems he could click a turbine’s on and off switch.
He pointed to Poland, where the hacking group Sandworm, tied to Russian military intelligence, attacked wind and solar park systems in late 2025.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk said weeks later that Poland narrowly avoided an outage that would have hit 500,000 households.
One system the team reached could run a park producing 9,000 megawatts, enough for 13 to 14 million households over a year.
Modat is not naming the parks, and El Yadmani said organisations cannot defend what they cannot see.
