By Holly the Assistant
You know the party games, right? With the cups, and the kid puts a pea under one, and switches them around, and then reveals that it’s under a different cup than you thought? Or makes a quarter vanish then pulls it from behind his friend’s ear?
Look over there! Lake America! Look over there! Horrible President Rankings! Look over there!
And everyone is looking. Over there.
I established a habit back in the first term of President Trump of when my leftist acquaintances started screeching about something inane, going to check the Executive Orders page at the White House Website. (I am a classical musician: of course I have leftist acquaintances. The real trick is telling which are truly leftist and which are situationally leftist to stay employed.) We have several interesting Executive Orders this week, among the mundane, expected, and distracting. There’s the one about beef trimming imports, there’s the Space Academy which is to be under NASA interestingly enough, and then there’s the National Emergency.
The what you say, Holly?
Yes, we have an Executive Order titled: DECLARING A NATIONAL EMERGENCY TO SECURE
THE UNITED STATES BULK-POWER SYSTEM. You can read it here, and you should, because I do not speak electrical or national security fluently enough to tell you what it means: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/declaring-a-national-emergency-to-secure-the-united-states-bulk-power-system/
I do not know if this means that no one can build a solar plant with solar panels from the PRC, or if it means that no one can buy solar panels from the PRC if they will be grid tied, or something else entirely. I do not know if this is the reason for renaming Lake Ontario, so everyone is looking the other way and screeching, or if something else is. But I find it interesting that the first I heard of this was bopping over to the White House website to see what Executive Orders were up.
If you do speak fluent electrical and national security (Jeff maybe?) and you feel like you can translate, maybe you’d be willing to do so in the comments?
And if you know of something else that Pres. Trump is distracting from, drop that in the comments, too, assuming it’s public knowledge, of course, just not widely known public knowledge.
According To Hoyt 
Chuckle Chuckle
Trump keeps “trolling them” and they keep falling for it.
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Slight of hand as opposed to…Oh look a squirrel!!!!
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It is a very broad EO. If I’m understanding it, the TLDR is any high power transmission component not made in the US can not be put on contract until the State Department has gone over everything with a fine tooth comb.
Current orders can continue for now, unless the State Department discovers something that means they must stop. They don’t have a full definition of what that is, beyond something that would let a foreign power damage the US grid. And they should have a full definition in about six months, provided a liberal judge doesn’t start the injunction train first thing Monday morning.
Honestly sounds like they found something pretty big and are trying to head it off immediately. Or they could be trying to signal to the power companies that they absolutely will go nuclear and bar all imports indefinitely if they try to get judges to issue injunctions. Which might work.
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The CISA alerts sent out to the IT community have featured a lot of infrastructure stuff of late, so I would not be surprised if what led to all the recent alerts on municipal water system intrusions and new security rules for them also implicated new Middle Kingdom power gizmos. Alternately if something were identified by the IC from assets in the factories or coding shops over there, they would prolly not advertise that by doing a CISA alert, but sending that up the chain leading to this EO is certainly plausible.
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Looks to me like everyone who manufactures overseas any component involved in a grid power system gets to onshore their production tout de suite.
I didn’t see inverters listed, and this only seems to apply to (primarily computer controlled stuff) that’s used for grid tied generation, so off-grid types can probably still order their power system components from the Chi-Coms.
Who steal the designs of the US inverter companies who off-shored their manufacturing and make their own for 3/4 the price.
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Very retired EE here.
From the list, “utility-scale and other grid-connected inverters” are mentioned. I figure that a residential grid-tie inverter could be (and IMHO, should be) included in this statement. After all, if Acme Inverters gets a substantial market share and ChiCom Semiconductor and Mother Boards has a controller circuit therein, it could serve to disrupt a chunk of power. Depending on the component (I’m assuming something more than an IC, up to and including the full Acme Inverter), you could see all manner of nastyness.
A malicious actor with illicit control of several thousand grid-tie systems could raise incredible havoc. Picture a “kamikazi” mode for a few thousand installations. Scratch neighborhoods when the local fire departments are overwhelmed.
Further complicating matters, some off-grid inverters can be configured to be grid-tie with menu options. My 2019 system has that capability, along with a option to have it tied to the bot-net of things.
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I’m reading this as an electrician’s wife, so while I know more than the typical layman, I am still a layman. Bear that in mind.
Section 5b has an extensive list of the equipment covered by this order, and starts with some of the things I would expect: reactors, substation controllers, and so on. But it also includes things like backup generators, which are commonly owned by private citizens and used at home. I also can’t find any provision stating that this applies solely to power companies, nor even only to people who live on the grid. (We’re just close enough to the Alaskan bush that we know of a few places locally that are exclusively powered via home generators, and even briefly considered buying one such property.) So my hunch is that this covers all sales (or at least all *new* sales) of any such equipment.
If the allegation of foreign actors using backdoors to access electrical equipment in America is true, that’s terrifying.
Husband is working today but I’ll see about getting his input when he isn’t busy.
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…sleight…
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Interesting…
“For the purpose of this order, this definition includes transmission lines rated at 69,000 volts (69 kV) or more, but does not include facilities used in the local distribution of electric energy.”
So they’re targeting the high-voltage power grid that moves electricity in bulk from place to place (and the generation systems that feed it), and *not* whatever’s going on in medium-voltage municipal systems (which is actually most of the grid).
If there’s some particular vulnerability they’ve found, I’m not sure what it’d be, although the inverters that convert the direct current (DC) produced by most renewable sources to alternating current (AC) to feed into the grid could be a big one if they’re as China-dominated as I’d guess. There’s some fancy electronics going on in there, along with some microprocessor-based control elements, so cybersecurity is a valid concern there.
Almost all of the big, high-dollar pieces of primary equipment mentioned in the EO (transformers, generator turbines, high-voltage circuit breakers, etc.) are controlled by electronic equipment, which is where cybersecurity comes in with them. Most of the manufacturers of said equipment provide OEM control electronics with them, and you’d want those to be made by someone you can trust. (Although they can be replaced and very frequently are; I work for a company whose products are used instead of the OEM controls by discerning power system engineers everywhere.) And the EO does specifically mention protective relaying, automation controllers, intelligent electronic devices, etc., which covers that angle.
I’m not at all sure how much of an effect this is going to have on anybody’s business or on security, really. How much of our high-voltage equipment and related electronics are actually made in “countries of concern” to begin with? No idea.
Anyway…I’m conversant with the electric power industry in certain ways, but there’s bound to be multiple people in here who know more about all of this than I do.
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The take I got with the 69kV threshold is that the 12.5kV distribution lines and associated 12.5kV to 220V user-side transformers (all pretty dumb to my knowledge) are safe for the while. Pacific Power got a bad batch of such transformers in the 1990s(ish), but they tended to crap out on their own schedules.
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