What Trump's energy EO actually means. Plus, IREN's FY26 earnings

Yesterday, President Trump issued Executive Order 14420: Declaring a National Emergency to Secure the United States Bulk-Power System.

Invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the order gives the Department of Energy the authority to block purchases – and restrict the operation of existing equipment – of foreign-origin energy grid equipment that the government brands a security threat.

The order covers transformers, generators and turbines, inverters, battery storage systems, high-voltage breakers, distributed control systems, and other key equipment used in generating stations, substations, and bulk-power control systems, and the Covered Foreign Entities under its scope include China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, and Venezuela, among others.

Ultimately, the government wants to make sure that the aforementioned foreign entities have not compromised grid infrastructure for power plants, substations, and grid interconnection / control with technology that allows these entities to remotely communicate, monitor, or control the infrastructure.

The DOE has 120 days to establish a regulatory regime to conform to the order, and it also must begin seeking out and identifying any existing threats within the U.S. grid. Under the order, the DOE has the authority to prohibit the importation and installation of equipment that doesn’t pass muster, and it can also mandate that established infrastructure be modified or replaced.

As the AI CAPEX cycle booms on, the order is an outright acknowledgement that the government sees a non-zero chance that a foreign adversary (read: China) may try to interfere with the U.S. energy grid during the largest, most expensive infrastructure push in U.S. history.

And there is precedent for such interference. In 2019, the DOE diverted a Chinese-made transform – originally intended for installation at the Western Area Power Administration – to a national laboratory. According to the Congressional Research Service, the DOE was worried the transformer contained “a software backdoor or other cyber vulnerability.” Then, in a separate case from 2024, a Chinese solar manufacturer, Deye, remotely disabled inverters operating in the U.S..

America sources much of its energy infrastructure from China, including 10% of its high-voltage transformers, 12% of its electrical/protective relays, 29% of its grid/solar inverters, 50% of its battery energy storage systems and related components, and 61% of non-EV lithium-ion batteries.

There’s plenty of equipment to sift through, and if the order seems paranoid, well – hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake, so better safe than sorry. But the questions we’re left with are: How will this impact lead times for the critical electrical equipment data centers rely on? Just how strict will the DOE’s regulations be? And how much infrastructure is already compromised?

-CMH

Today, we open with a TLDR of NVIDIA’s blow-out Q2 earnings, before hopping to Trump’s latest Executive Order on bulk-energy system infrastructure to screen for cybersecurity backdoors in imported goods. We wrap with an interview with Giga Energy Chief Business Officer Matt Prusak, plus the Rainey Center’s latest research on which arguments work best to dispel data center misinformation to win over data center opponents.

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