The Trump administration’s Executive Order 14420 announced in August directs a sweeping review of security vulnerabilities in US electrical equipment supply chains. The order covers dozens of categories of electricity system equipment, including generation technologies, transmission equipment, energy storage systems, and control and safety equipment. The Department of Energy (DOE), in coordination with other federal agencies, has 120 days to draft the implementing rules and 180 days to recommend revisions to the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), which governs federal procurement of energy infrastructure. Our experts weigh in on what the order gets right and what else officials should consider to ensure the security of the US power system.
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Frank Willey: Securing the grid requires manufacturing credible alternatives to risky components
In the AI era, protecting electrical systems is critical to both security and prosperity
The president’s assessment of vulnerabilities in the US bulk-power system and the risks they pose to friends and allies is directionally right. This order should be the first step toward broader policies limiting Chinese subterfuge against critical infrastructure worldwide. Successive administrations have investigated supply-chain vulnerabilities in the power sector, at times through extraordinary measures, including the government’s seizure and examination of a Chinese-built transformer. Those efforts underscore that critical energy infrastructure is a soft underbelly of the economic vitality, political stability, and national security of liberal democracies.
By empowering the secretary of energy and other officials to “identify, isolate, monitor, secure, disconnect, replace, or remove” risky equipment, the United States is moving its grid toward security and resilience. This approach could eventually extend across other critical sectors and help establish common markets in which trusted suppliers from allied economies compete and build secure and affordable supply chains. Meanwhile, malign actors would have fewer opportunities to exploit technological vulnerabilities to hold US infrastructure and, by extension, US policy, hostage.
This is a critical step toward an emerging economic Cold War posture. In the artificial intelligence era, subnational electricity systems increasingly carry international consequences for the security and prosperity of the free world.
Landon Derentz is vice president for energy and infrastructure at the Atlantic Council, and senior director and Morningstar chair for global energy security at its Global Energy Center.
Securing the grid requires manufacturing credible alternatives to risky components
Executive Order 14420’s broad investigative scope reflects real uncertainties in power system security, the need to consistently evaluate vulnerabilities, and the growing capabilities of adversaries to interfere with critical infrastructure. Chinese-sourced components are a particular concern, given the geopolitical rivalry with China that is increasingly centered on the electricity infrastructure needed to power AI development. Critical grid components, including inverters, switchgears, and capacitors sourced from China and other adversarial nations are among the likely candidates for DOE’s final rule.
Battery energy storage systems (BESS) and the lithium battery supply chains underlying them deserve particular attention. DOE should focus specifically on battery management systems (BMS) sourced from adversarial nations that are embedded in BESS, since BMS contain smart components that can be accessed and manipulated remotely. DOE’s Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response office (CESER) has already released a report that provides a framework for assessing foreign-manufactured components in supply chains for BESS, inverter-based resources, and transformers and offers recommendations to manufacturers, technology integrators, energy companies, utilities, and policymakers that help reduce exposure to security vulnerabilities. This risk is not limited to equipment bought directly from China. Battery systems imported from allied countries, along with inverters and transformers more broadly, often contain Chinese-origin components as well.
While the executive order does not cover mineral processing, it should be part of the same conversation. The United States needs to build domestic lithium processing and battery manufacturing capacity, which is currently dominated by China, and accelerate testing and commercialization of alternative battery chemistries. China also manufactures well over 80 percent of the global supply of batteries and also dominates production of power conversion systems and battery management systems. US imports of lithium-ion batteries are sourced primarily from China (see figure 1).
Also, China was the third largest supplier of BESS imports to the United States in the first half of 2026, behind South Korea and Japan (see figure 2). Building US battery manufacturing capacity while investigating alternative chemistries like sodium-ion and zinc-iron is therefore both a security obligation and an economic opportunity.
Federal policy through DOE demonstration funding, tax incentives modeled on existing battery manufacturing credits, and coordinated procurement efforts under the forthcoming Federal Acquisition Regulation revisions could accelerate this shift from pilot projects to grid deployment. Making investments in domestic manufacturing now is critical to reducing reliance on foreign-sourced equipment in the long run, so that US energy growth is not constrained by a supply chain it does not control.
Frank Willey is an assistant director in the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center.
The bulk-power system is already behind the curve. Achieving security requires working with allies and partners.
While protecting grid infrastructure should certainly be a top priority, as it is critical to US national security, doing so will be a herculean task, requiring a willingness to invest tremendous amounts of capital and the development of complex but efficient supply chains. As is, there is already a crisis facing the US power grid that can’t be solved solely by building more power lines, approving new power generation, or changing out grid software. The equipment needed to keep the grid running—transformers that regulate voltage, circuit breakers that protect against faults, high-voltage cables that carry power across regions, and steel poles that hold the network together—is hard to make, and materials are limited. Supply-chain bottlenecks are taking years to clear, delaying projects, inflating costs, and threatening reliability.
Transformers are key to the electricity grid: they regulate voltage as power travels across the wires, increasing voltage for more efficient long-distance transmission, and decreasing it for medium-distance travel and again for delivery to buildings. Replacing them has become costly and time-consuming, with utilities reporting that transformers cost four to six times what they cost before 2022, in addition to the multiyear wait times.
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation says the lead time, the wait between placing an order and the product being delivered, hit roughly 120 weeks—more than two years—in 2024, with large power transformers taking as long as 210 weeks—up to four years. Those delays have slowed both maintenance and new construction across much of the grid, and they decrease energy security.
Transformer production depends heavily on a handful of materials and suppliers. The cores of most US transformers usegrain-oriented electrical steel, a special type of steel with particular magnetic properties, which is made domestically only by Cleveland-Cliffs at plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Imports have long filled the gap: Roughly 80 percent of large transformers have historically been imported. But global demand has also surged, tightening access to steel, as well as copper.
Given the tangle of supply chain challenges associated with the bulk-power system, the executive order reinforces the need for the United States to work closely with trusted allies and partners to acquire the equipment required for a secure grid.
Morgan D. Bazilian is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center and the director of the Payne Institute for Public Policy and professor at the Colorado School of Mines. Previously, he was lead energy specialist at the World Bank and has over two decades of experience in energy security, natural resources, national security, energy poverty, and international affairs.
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Image: Electrical infrastructure at Monroe Substation in Eugene on June 17, 2026.