(TEXAS SCORECARD) – Communist China is a growing threat to the United States. The nation also threatens Texas’ power grid.
John Ratcliffe, former U.S. Director of National Intelligence, warned about the threat of China. “They are both an adversary and a competitor, but they should be more of a competitor and less of an adversary, and it’s the other way around right now,” he said in May 2021. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s February 2024 Annual Threat Assessment maintains China is a threat.
Part four of this series examined the threat of an electromagnetic pulse to Texas’ power grid. Specialists emphasized the necessity of hardening the grid to protect against such an attack and noted that the technology is readily available.
China is among the nations capable of hitting America with an EMP, which would shut down the national grid, along with Texas’ grid. But China poses other threats. America’s overreliance on Chinese industrial production has allowed them to infiltrate our grid.
The Threat
China has already penetrated our electrical grid. Texas Scorecard reviewed this widely reported threat in August 2022. In 2015, Chinese billionaire Sun Guangxin started buying land in Val Verde County, Texas. Eventually, he bought roughly 7 percent of the land in that county. Guangxin was also a former general of the Chinese army. The purchase of this land gave Communist China a foothold on Texas land 70 miles from a U.S. Military installation—Laughlin Air Force Base. “It was owned by an LLC formed in Houston but owned and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party,” Jason Isaac, an energy specialist with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told Texas Scorecard. “The Chinese, the way they work, if you’re a business and you’re affiliated or even closely related to China, then you’ve got to have a member of the Communist Party as part of your employees, and you’ve got to pay them.”
Guangxin proposed building a wind farm. Isaac said that in 2021, State Sen. Donna Campbell (R-New Braunfels) acted. She proposed a measure—which became law—that didn’t allow Guangxin’s wind farm to connect to Texas’ grid. Isaac learned China didn’t give up. “I think what they’ve done is they’ve just leased it off to an Italian company, and now an Italian or Spanish company is coming in, and they’re putting in solar farms, all along the devil’s backbone,” he said. “It is a national security threat. You see these lands being bought up by Chinese affiliates all around the country; they just happen to be near military bases.”
Isaac mentioned two ways to combat this. One would be banning foreign ownership of Texas land. Another would be mandated transparency. “There needs to be some more disclosure of these companies that are connecting to our grid,” he said. “The last thing we want is any nefarious actors doing that. We saw what happened with the pipeline a couple of years ago in the eastern United States that resulted in a pipeline getting hacked and shut down, gas prices soaring, people [and] stations running out. If that were to happen to the grid, it would be catastrophic to the economic prosperity of Texas, which is the fuel of this country.”
But Communist China is infiltrating our grid in another way. Like much of anything else one can buy in America, China makes transformers for our electrical grids. “We know that the transformers we’re buying from China have malware in them,” State Sen. Bob Hall (R-Edgewood) said. Hall added that this was something former President Donald Trump was moving to stop before “Biden reversed it.”
The use of Chinese malware-infested transformers exposed the Texas power grid and the national grid to extreme risk. “They were in a position where they actually didn’t even have to do an EMP attack,” Hall explained. “They could just send the signals to their transformers and turn them off.”
Isaac agreed there was a danger to all of this. “The last thing we want to do is make it easy for them to connect to our energy infrastructure,” he said.
However, China still seeks to infiltrate American and Texas energy systems in other ways.
Red Energy
Kyle Bass is an investor and environmentalist. He’s also a specialist in foreign affairs, particularly China. He’s a member of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, an organization that seeks to educate the public on the Red China threat.
In an interview with Texas Scorecard, Bass shared how Communist China supports so-called “green energy.”
“China had to figure out how to get dollars from us, which they were the world’s factory floor. And now they’re trying to transform into a technological superpower,” he said. “Imagine if they could, all of a sudden, become the world’s go-to energy source. Heretofore, they had not been an energy source; they had been an energy buyer, right? So our reliance on them for wind and solar, puts them in a very important position on the global stage, especially with our desire to clean up the environment.”
There’s also the problem that China creates materials for wind and solar power.
“Those high energy intensive solar panels and the concrete and resins that go into making wind turbines come from China,” said Luke Dunn, an energy specialist with CrownQuest.
“The reliance on China just makes it infinitely worse. When you think about the components within the windmills or the solar panels, they’re computer chips, right?” Bass said. “If someone wants to inhibit the flow, they can actually do it if they know if they can get to those chips. Well, who do you think’s providing those chips for those solar panels? The bad guys.”
While China has positioned itself to fuel the West’s frenzy on unreliable energy, the communist country is belching ever greater quantities of carbon emissions. “China has increased theirs by almost 600 percent. They haven’t stopped. They build a new coal-fired power plant every three days. Sixty-seven percent of China’s power still comes from coal,” Bass said. “China’s the biggest climate criminal in the world. If you look at the emissions, over a 20-year period, the U.S. has grown its GDP by more than 100 percent. Yet, we have cut our emissions by 25 percent. Over a 20-year period, Europe has been able to cut their emissions 31 percent.”
All of this together shows the quest for unreliable energy is empowering and opening the door for a hostile nation to Texas and the United States. “We’re subsidizing an enemy country and allowing them to build it, and then we’re bringing them over here, and it’s making us more unreliable,” said State Sen. Lois Kolkhorst (R-Brenham). “It’s actually going to be a detriment to our businesses and our citizens. So it’s kind of an awakening moment.”