The Epoch Times investigative reporter Kevin Stocklin discusses how efforts to remake America’s electric grid, including Biden’s green energy transition, has left China, an accused saboteur of our infrastructure, as an essential supplier of transformers and other critical hardware.
A new Epoch Times article written by investigative reporter Kevin Stocklin reveals that, while it appears China’s “cartels” are lending a hand on the power front, it could also leave America’s electric grid vulnerable to foreign control and sabotage.
“If they’re able to knock the grid out, basically modern society is going to fall,” Joe Trotter, director of the Energy, Environment, and Agriculture Task Force at the American Legislative Exchange Counsel, told The Epoch Times. “The modern grid runs our whole infrastructure and without power, we don’t have refrigeration, our food supply goes down, our water supply goes down. If the power went out across the entire United States for a month, people would die. There’d be widespread looting. Two-to-three months and you might actually have a full societal collapse.”
Despite the potential attacks we’ve already seen from countries like China, Russia and Iran, utilities continue to import essential hardware from China, with an estimated 10-15 percent of our electric transformers now being supplied by Chinese companies. In 2020, former President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13920, which declared a state of emergency regarding America’s power grid and barred new imports of Chinese hardware. Upon taking office, President Biden rescinded that order.
In 2019, federal agents seized a transformer that arrived from China, on its way to being installed in a Colorado electric grid, and took it to a lab where it was disassembled for analysis. While the report remains classified, intelligence sources say they found that it contained microchips that intentionally allowed its functions to be hacked.
Critics say that China, due to things like “backdoors” in microchips installed in grid hardware, will have the ability to shut down America’s power grid at will. Kevin Stocklin joins us now to discuss his article further.