Chile's Huatacondo solar plant still offline two months after cyberattack

Serguey Asael Shinder30 October 2026, 09:332 min read

Since 27 August, a 103 MW solar plant in northern Chile has not delivered a single megawatt-hour to the grid. Chile's National Electricity Coordinator still lists the Huatacondo plant in the Tarapacá region and its 98 MW/312 MWh battery system as under forced disconnection with 0% availability in its daily report for 27 October, pv magazine reports from a review of those reports.

The record traces back to 1:10 p.m. on 27 August, when the operator's control centre requested the forced disconnection of the plant and the battery, citing a "cyberattack on the Huatacondo facilities". A transformer at the Santa Rita substation was disconnected at the same time on the same grounds. At 9:30 p.m. that day, another control centre reported that the Olivos and Espinos thermal plants in the Coquimbo region could not be dispatched after losing monitoring and remote control. The coordinator's reports do not say whether the incidents are connected.

The solar plant, inaugurated in 2019, is majority-owned by Japan's Sojitz with Shikoku Electric Power and France's Eiffage. The battery was still being commissioned when the incident happened and remained in commissioning on 27 October, so its outage is not an interruption of commercial operation. No restoration date has been announced, and the cause and extent of the attack have not been confirmed.

pv magazine says it examined 360 of the 365 daily reports from the past year and found no other incidents explicitly attributed to cyberattacks. A year ago the head of the coordinator's cybersecurity unit had said Chile had recorded no attack with significant impact on its power system. The day after the August incidents, Chile's energy commission opened a consultation on a draft cybersecurity standard for the sector.

What it means

A two-month forced outage is long for a plant whose equipment was not physically damaged, and it suggests the recovery problem is trust in control systems rather than repair. Until the owners or the coordinator explain what happened, the case shows mainly how little public detail a grid incident report contains.