China Given Full Access To U.S. Power Grid

China now controls America’s energy grid, thanks to Biden

Ethan Huff 

EO 13990, which purports to be about “climate change,” contains questionably anomalous verbiage that suspends a key security measure put in place by President Donald Trump last May. For the next 90 days, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will have full access to the United States power grid.

EO 13920, which was signed by Trump and overridden by Biden, declared an official national emergency concerning the nation’s electric grid. It prohibited all acquisition or installation of:

“… any bulk-power electric equipment … designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied by persons owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of a foreign adversary.”

In other words, Trump blocked adversary nations like China from having any influence over our nation’s power grid, which Biden quickly reversed upon being “inaugurated.”

Trump’s EO was timely because just last year the U.S. seized a Chinese-built transformer because officials believed “its electronics had been secretly given malicious capabilities, possibly allowing a distant adversary to monitor or even disable it on command.”

Cybersecurity expert Joseph Weiss reported that officials found “electronics that should not have been part of the transformer,” describing them as “hardware backdoors” for foreign adversaries like China to “effectively gain control of the transformers without any network forensics being the wiser.”

Even after Biden’s 90-day allowance for Chinese access to America’s grid expires, the threat to American energy continuity will still be present, warns Tommy Waller, director of infrastructure security at the Center for Security Policy.

“We’re also worried about sensors and actuators and drives that are installed even if they are not connected to the internet,” he is quoted as saying.

“If that hardware installed inside of them is designed at some point to send the wrong readings, it could sabotage the safety and security of that system.”

A 2018 report from the President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) examined America’s ability to respond to and recover from a potential outage “of a magnitude beyond modern experience, exceeding prior events in severity, scale, duration, and consequence.” The findings were grim.

“Despite the efforts to secure the grid from a potentially catastrophic shutdown, the threat of a devastating power disruption remains,” warns George Griffin from the Consortium of Defense Analysts blog.