Trump's Grid Emergency Order Bans the Two Technologies Actually Fixing the Grid

All right, well, today we're going to talk about an executive order that just made half the grid's newest hardware a national security problem.

So nine days ago, the president declared a national emergency.

as he is prone to do, over the American power grid, not about blackouts, but about who built the equipment.

The order bans importing or installing foreign-made grid hardware from a list of countries that includes China and gives the Energy Secretary the authority to order equipment already installed and running to be disconnected and physically removed.

So here's what's making things interesting.

It covers grid batteries, utility-scale inverters, the two fastest growing things in and on the American grid.

And it's in the part of the supply chain that China dominates.

The order's own justification for urgency is the electricity demand coming from AI and data centers.

So today, the question is, is the security fix that six years of warnings finally produced, or did we just declare an emergency about how things we were counting on to solve the last emergency are actually bad and we shouldn't have done them in the first place? So let's start off with the plane mechanics, Mike, because the coverage is calling this a Chinese transformer ban, but it's a lot bigger than that.

So let's start with what the order actually authorizes.

Yeah, sure.

So it's an IEPA emergency declaration, which was signed on the 26th of August.

And it cites President Trump's own 2020 finding as precedent.

So a sequel to Executive Order 13920, for all of you playing along at home, which was suspended in 2021 by the Biden administration, never replaced.

The prohibition is prospective, acquisition, importation, transfer, installation of foreign-produced bulk power equipment, as you discussed, covered for an entity connection plus undue risk.

The section with teeth is Section 2B.

Again, if you're...

You got to follow along at home.

Yeah, being an armchair attorney, really, really steeped in energy law.

Um, but is, is that for equipment already installed and operating, the secretary can require that it be, uh, identified, isolated, monitored, disconnected, replaced, or removed.

Which means essentially that like, uh, the order has given the exec, the power to the secretary to take any piece of equipment pretty much on the grid that has been, you know, manufactured at one point with like a Chinese, uh, service, uh, control system and just yank it right out of the grid.

And so there's a lot of context associated with that.

You know, like we've talked about, as you mentioned, substation transformers, utility scale and grid connected inverters.

So, for example, the inverters on my solar panels may or may not have been manufactured in China.

I don't know.