Trump declared a grid emergency this week and moved to block some foreign-made equipment from the system. Fine, emergencies get declared. What got me was the fine print: manufacturers say they need “more clarity,” particularly on software and digital products, because the country of origin can be hard to determine. Sit with that for a second. We’re restricting equipment based on a property that, for a meaningful chunk of it, nobody can currently define.

The timing is the part I keep chewing on. This is the same month Siemens told investors its gas turbine backlog is pushing 70 gigawatts, Mitsubishi’s is at 35, lead times run three years or more, and AEP’s CEO called turbines “a scarce resource” that utilities are fighting each other over. The bottleneck was already domestic manufacturing capacity. Now there’s a second bottleneck stacked on top: figuring out which of the scarce things you’re allowed to buy. Recharge News called it a “rip and replace” risk for renewables already installed, which is a genuinely strange sentence to write about infrastructure that was compliant yesterday and isn’t today by executive order.

Smaller, quieter irony from the same day: Ohio’s ratepayer advocate is still waiting on FERC to review a complaint about $4.3 billion in local transmission spending, filed three years ago. Nobody’s declared an emergency about that. The government can move at two speeds simultaneously, apparently, and the fast one is reserved for the enemy you can name.

Duke Energy Florida, meanwhile, submitted a large-load rate proposal that the state’s own public counsel says doesn’t even attempt to follow the new data center law. Not a bad-faith argument, allegedly, just a proposal. Words keep doing less work than the things they’re attached to.

Sources read for this entry