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★ Tuesday — Policy to Profit
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The White House Just Used Wartime Powers on the Power Grid. Here’s Who Wins.
Five Defense Production Act orders. One day. And a $2 billion factory-building wave for the equipment America can’t get fast enough.
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You can’t build a data center without a transformer. You can’t connect a factory to the grid without one. You can’t hook up a neighborhood. Every time America builds something new, a transformer has to sit between it and the power supply.
And right now, you can’t get one. Not quickly. The wait time for a large power transformer is two to four years. Demand surged 274% between 2019 and 2025, per Wood Mackenzie. Prices are up as much as 95%. And the domestic supply simply can’t keep up.
On April 20, the White House did something about it. Five presidential orders in a single day. All using the Defense Production Act — the same wartime law Truman used in 1950.
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Here’s what the DPA orders cover. Five sectors, all declared essential to national defense:
Grid infrastructure — transformers, transmission lines, substations, circuit breakers, and their upstream supply chains. Large-scale energy infrastructure — engineering, permitting, and domestic manufacturing capacity. Natural gas and LNG — pipelines, processing plants, storage, and export terminals. Petroleum — production, refining, and pipeline logistics. Coal — supply chains and baseload power generation.
Under Section 303 of the DPA, the DOE can now offer loans, loan guarantees, and purchase commitments to domestic manufacturers. It can also share costs on new factory construction. That’s a powerful toolkit — the same one used to boost vaccine production during COVID.
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The private sector was already moving. Nearly $2 billion has been committed to new transformer factories in the U.S.
Hitachi Energy is building a $457 million plant in South Boston, Virginia — set to become the largest transformer factory in the country by 2028. Siemens Energy is constructing a $150 million facility in Charlotte, North Carolina. Eaton committed $340 million to a new plant in South Carolina. GE Vernova paid $5.3 billion in February to acquire the remaining half of Prolec GE. That added roughly 10,000 employees and seven manufacturing sites across the Americas — five of them in the U.S. Prolec’s primary plant is in Monterrey, Mexico. But its U.S. sites in Louisiana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas serve the domestic grid directly.
The DPA orders give all of these companies a potential lifeline — federal financing to build faster. And the timing matters. Every chip fab, pharma plant, and aluminum smelter we’ve covered in this newsletter needs grid power to run. If you can’t get a transformer, you can’t turn the lights on. This is the bottleneck behind the bottleneck.
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★ The Fine Print
The DPA authorizes tools. It doesn’t guarantee funding. The White House has not confirmed a specific dollar amount. Implementation depends on DOE action and ultimately on congressional appropriations. Analysts at Novogradac call the outcome “uncertain.”
These are powerful signals of intent. But signals aren’t checks. Watch for DOE to announce specific projects and funding levels in the months ahead.
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★ THE INVESTOR ANGLE — GE VERNOVA (NYSE: GEV)
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Backlog Growth
+$13B
In Q1 Alone
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DC Orders
$2.4B
More Than All 2025
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Prolec GE Buy
$5.3B
7 Plants, 5 in U.S.
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GE Vernova is the biggest winner. It makes gas turbines, grid equipment, and — after the $5.3 billion Prolec GE acquisition — transformers. CEO Scott Strazik said the company now expects 110 GW of gas turbine backlog by year-end. Data center Electrification orders in Q1 topped all of last year combined.
Other names to watch: Eaton (NYSE: ETN) for transformers and electrical distribution. Hitachi Energy’s parent Hitachi (OTC: HTHIY) for large power transformers. And the ETF play — the Utilities Select Sector SPDR (XLU) — which benefits when grid buildout accelerates.
The risk? These DPA orders authorize action, but DOE hasn’t committed funding yet. The real test comes when specific projects get dollars attached. Still, the direction is clear. America can’t build the future on a grid it can’t power. And the companies that make the equipment to fix that have never had this much demand — or this much government backing.
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