By Patrick Flannery, CEO & Founder
A few weeks ago, President Trump declared a national emergency and signed an executive order restricting certain foreign-produced equipment from the US bulk-power system. The order targets transformers, batteries, inverters, and associated software that could harbor cybersecurity vulnerabilities or give foreign adversaries operational access to American energy infrastructure.
I want to be clear about something: the politics here are beside the point. The underlying reality has been true for years. The US grid is old, fragmented, and dependent on foreign-manufactured components in ways that create real operational risk. China holds roughly 80% of global manufacturing capacity for lithium-ion batteries and solar inverters. That concentration was always a vulnerability. What changed yesterday is that the federal government is now treating it with the urgency it deserves.
Replacement is an infrastructure problem, not a procurement decision. The order contemplates replacing already-installed foreign equipment. That sounds straightforward. It is not. Replacement requires sites with existing grid access, financing, permitting, and operators who can deploy quickly. The bottleneck is not political will. It is the lack of domestic infrastructure operators who can move fast enough at the right scale. That gap is exactly what Ground Floor Energy was built to close.
The order directs the Department of Energy to recommend revisions to federal procurement rules to prioritize US-manufactured energy infrastructure within 180 days. That window is the moment for domestic operators to demonstrate their model. The projects that can move from site selection to operation in 12 to 18 months — not 10 years — are the ones that will matter when those procurement rules change.
The winners in this new era will be those who make better use of the infrastructure we already have. This recent executive order makes that case more urgently than anything I could write.