The United States’ dependence on Chinese-made extra-high voltage transformers is making it easier for China’s communist regime to switch off the U.S. power grid and throw the country into chaos, warned Tommy Waller, president of the Center for Security Policy.
“Extra-high voltage transformers are what many experts consider to be the backbone of our modern grid,” Waller said in an interview on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.
“If this device that we depend on for the lifeblood of our modern civilization was able to be manipulated, if it was able to be turned off, then that could be extremely problematic for us,” he told host Jan Jekielek.
“When we say the grid, we’re talking about the whole system that generates electricity, transmits it, and distributes it,” he explained, noting that power must be transmitted at extremely high voltages to minimize losses over long-distance travel. “These extra-high voltage transformers are needed to step up the voltage. These assets are absolutely critical.”
It could take one to even four years to build just one such transformer, according to Waller. They are also huge, and weigh hundreds of tons—meaning that shipping them across the country isn’t easy, and in some cases, specialized rail cars must be used.
“There’s only so many of those assets,” he said. “We can’t afford to lose these for really any reason, whether it’s because they were manufactured with malicious intent to manipulate them or if they’re attacked in different forms of attacks.”
China’s Unrestricted Warfare
In 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. officials had seized a 250-ton Chinese-built transformer they suspected had been meddled with and sent it to the U.S. Department of Energy-owned Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico for inspection.According to the report, officials found “electronics that should not have been part of the transformer” or “hardware back doors” that could “secretly allow the Chinese to gain effective control of the transformers.”
“The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] has been executing unrestricted warfare against the rest of the free world, predominantly the United States,” Waller told Jekielek. “One method of unrestricted warfare is looking for these critical vulnerabilities of a society and figuring out how to exploit those.”
To exploit America’s dependency on overseas-made transformers, China first embedded itself into the global market of grain-oriented electrical steel—a specialty alloy needed to produce the equipment. China now produces about half of the world’s grain-oriented steel.
“They identified that these transformers need a certain type of steel to be manufactured. So what did the Chinese do? They dumped into the market massive amounts of grain-oriented steel, and they cornered the market for even the precursors that are needed to create the transformers,” Waller stated, adding that the U.S. utility industry eventually turned to China for transformers to keep expenses down.
America’s Policy Problem
Recognizing this vulnerability, then-President Donald Trump in 2020 issued an executive order declaring a national emergency over threats to the nation’s electric grid. The order essentially banned the purchase or installation of any bulk-power electric equipment designed or built by any company under the control of countries hostile to the United States, including China.In 2021, when President Joe Biden took office, the Trump order was suspended for 90 days, although the prohibitions on Chinese electrical equipment remained in place.
Although the Biden administration is aware of the CCP’s threat to the grid, the green energy agenda it is pursuing will not help counter that threat, Waller said.
“There will be blackouts if we continue some of the policies that our government has applied upon the nation, just due to physics,” he said, noting that it’s impossible to phase out all traditional gas-powered cars and trucks, while at the same time replacing large, steady power generators with renewables sources such as solar and wind.
“Think about the draw the demand that electric vehicles and electric vehicle charging stations have on the grid. That’s going to require a lot more electricity,” he said. “Yet, because of lots of different government policies, we’re shutting down the largest producers of electricity.
“The reality is that right now, the grid is so vulnerable to some forms of threat from Mother Nature that even if we deterred all of our human adversaries from taking it down, it’s 100 percent certain, at some point, the grid will go down because of solar weather.”
History has already painted a rather grim image of what would happen in a large-scale outage. In 1977, New York City went dark after lightning struck power lines, only to be illuminated by fires from widespread arson, looting, and riots.
“There were more than 4,500 arrests of people who were looting. More than 550 police officers [were] injured in the line of duty. Over $300 million worth of damage in that city in 24 hours,” Waller said, noting that for those living in large cities, it could deprive them of the basic elements necessary to sustain life, from water to food.
“So every single way that you look at it, modern society is not prepared to live without electricity. So in short order, you have suffering, and you have chaos, and you have societal collapse when we lose portions of our grid. And our enemies know that.”
