US Grid Security Order Sets Off Vendor Scramble as Battery Startups Push Around It

That deadline is the concrete thing. On 26 August 2026, President Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency to ban or restrict high-risk foreign-produced equipment in the US electric grid. The order covers hardware, software and firmware in generation, transmission or control facilities operating at 69 kilovolts or above: large transformers, grid-tied inverters, circuit breakers, battery energy storage systems, SCADA software and industrial control systems. Residential solar inverters and commercial distribution below 69 kV fall outside it.

No vendor has been named. According to SemiEngineering, restrictions are limited for now to broad equipment categories combined with country of origin, and the specifics do not exist until the Department of Energy publishes implementing rules, due 24 December 2026. Those rules may take the form of a prohibited-entity list, a pre-qualified vendor white list, or both.

Provenance moves down the supply chain

The definition of a Covered Foreign Entity is deliberately wide. It applies to any company, national or subsidiary owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign adversary. That includes countries under US arms embargoes, such as Russia, Iran and North Korea. But the analysis is blunt that China is the real concern, since the others do not supply much to the power sector. Vendors headquartered in, owned from, or substantially dependent on manufacturing in those jurisdictions are directly affected.

Western vendors are not automatically clear. Because the order follows the supply chain downward, a US or European manufacturer that sources critical sub-components, chips, communications modules or internal software from a covered jurisdiction may still find its finished product restricted. SemiEngineering puts it plainly: provenance now has to be established across every tier, not just claimed at the enclosure.

That is a change from the 2020 order issued under the first Trump administration, which covered broadly similar ground but focused on hardware provenance, who built the transformer and where. It produced a single prohibition action before being suspended and then rescinded in 2021. The 2026 version extends into the digital layer, naming inverters, battery storage, control systems and industrial control components alongside their software, firmware, remote-access capabilities and update mechanisms. Moving assembly to another country no longer solves the problem.

The scale behind the concern is not in dispute. SemiEngineering cites the International Energy Agency putting China at roughly 80% of world manufacturing capacity for batteries and solar inverters, with market analysts placing Chinese firms at around half of all solar inverters installed globally. The United States has also imported large power transformers from China at scale over the past decade.

Large power transformers already carry multi-year lead times in normal conditions; the alternative supplier base for several categories is thin and cannot be built on a crisis timeline.

That is the availability argument, and it is why the order requires reliability, safety and replacement availability to be weighed before any removal is ordered. The second argument is integrity: fleet concentration means a single vendor's remote-update and remote-control authority can span enough installed capacity to matter for grid stability, a structural property of the market independent of any manufacturer's intentions. SemiEngineering also notes that security research has shown operational technology can contain vulnerabilities enabling scalable attacks on the grid regardless of country of origin, pointing to Forescout Vedere Labs' SUN:DOWN report of March 2025, which disclosed 46 vulnerabilities across three of the world's ten leading vendors.

Transactions after 26 August 2026 can be restricted, and the Secretary of Energy can require equipment installed before that date to be monitored, disconnected, replaced or removed. Utilities, the analysis says, are already pausing procurement with foreign-linked supply chains and pressing vendors for provenance answers during active bids, well before any rule exists.

Smaller batteries route around the permitting queue

The compliance problem applies to the big iron. It does not apply to a battery that plugs into an air-conditioning unit. On 1 October, MIT Technology Review's climate newsletter The Spark described how startups are sidestepping New York City's tangle of regulations for large energy storage by deploying small batteries in unexpected places, from induction stovetops to food carts.

PopWheels built a battery-swapping system for delivery drivers on e-bikes. David Hammer, cofounder, said at a New York Climate Week event on 24 September that there are about 50 cabinets across New York City and about 2,500 batteries in circulation. The company recently began supplying food cart operators, letting them replace gas generators; about four of its batteries supply five kilowatt-hours, roughly a day's operation for many carts.

Copper builds induction stoves with integrated batteries, which let residents cook during outages and can help homeowners avoid expensive electrical upgrades because the battery supplies part of the power when the stove is in use. Sam Calisch, cofounder and CEO, said at the same event: "We're not just selling a battery for resilience, we're selling it for cost savings." Every Electric plugs batteries into air-conditioning units and pays customers to cut use at high-stress times; David Energy runs a similar model aimed at laundromats, parking garages and gyms.

Because these units are small or built into another device, they generally need no grid upgrades or extensive permitting. The newsletter compares the model to balcony solar. James McGinniss, cofounder and CEO of David Energy, told the event: "This is the biggest thing to happen in the power grid sector in the last 20 years." Calisch added that if every stove in America shipped with a battery, it would add up to tens of gigawatts of power. MIT Technology Review is careful to note the limits: large-scale storage is still needed to support intermittent wind and solar.

Delhi's 25-year repair job

The case for treating grid losses as an investment target rather than a technical footnote comes from IEEE Spectrum, which published an essay on 1 October by power and energy editor Emily Waltz. More than half of the countries that track the metrics lost at least 10% of their electricity in 2023, according to the World Bank, and losses topped 20% for 24 of those nations. Two countries lost more than half of what they generated.

Delhi cut its electricity losses from about 50% to 5% over the past 25 years, the subject of a piece by Mini Shaji Thomas, an electrical engineer at Jamia Millia Islamia who has lived in the city since the 1990s. Waltz is clear that the fix was not a product: equipment across entire networks had to be updated, multiple arms of government had to agree on reforms and coordinate, regulations had to be written or revised, investments made and cultures changed. Georgia went from losses of over 16% in 2002 to about 8% in 2023. Singapore dropped from 6.6% to 0.2% over the same period.

The demand side is not helping. The US Energy Information Administration reported on 30 September that light-duty electric vehicles in the United States consumed 8% more electricity in the first six months of 2026 than in the last half of 2025, down from the 13% to 24% growth seen in recent six-month periods. Total light-duty EV electricity use has more than doubled since the first half of 2023, reaching nearly 14 billion kilowatt-hours in 1H26. New EV sales fell 19% in 1H26 compared with 2H25 after the New Clean Vehicle Credit and Qualified Commercial Clean Vehicle Credit ended on 30 September 2025.

Fleet demand is moving the other way. CleanTechnica reported on 30 September that FedEx has ordered 2,000 electric trucks from the California startup Harbinger. The same outlet noted that Tesla held an opening ceremony on 26 September for volume production at its Semi factory in Sparks, Nevada, with output reportedly anticipated at 50,000 trucks per year, after an order of 2,500 electric trucks through the ZET SCALE collective, which counts Microsoft and PepsiCo among its members. Those trucks will charge from the same grid the 26 August order is trying to secure, and the same grid Delhi spent a quarter century repairing.

One disagreement is worth flagging. CleanTechnica argues in a 30 September piece that the US could end up last in vehicle electrification, citing a 5.9% BEV share in the first half of 2026 against 45% in China in August and 26% in Europe in July. The EIA data it draws on show slowing electricity consumption growth, not a reversal. The two readings point in different directions, and the December rules will not settle that argument either.