Chinese wind power plant in Texas may be a Trojan horse

Texas lawmakers are trying to pass legislation to stop the construction of a wind power plant in Texas because of concerns that the Chinese Communist Party is planting a Trojan horse in the United States that could endanger critical U.S. infrastructure.

Texas Legislature Rejects Blue Mountain Wind Power Plant as National Security Threat

According to the Voice of America, a company called GH America Energy began purchasing about 140,000 acres of land in Val Verde County, Texas, in 2015 to build the Blue Hills Wind Farm. The project is located less than 70 miles from Laughlin Air Force Base, which is the largest pilot training base in the United States.

Since this “GH America Energy” company is a subsidiary of the Chinese listed company “Guanghui Energy”, which is owned by Sun Guangshin, known as the “richest man in Xinjiang”. Sun Guangxin has a military background and has been in business since he retired from the military, and has also served as a member of the Standing Committee of the Xinjiang Regional Political Consultative Conference.

Opponents of GH American Energy fear that the company may have ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s military and that the military may be using the wind power plant’s geographic advantage for espionage purposes.

Texas Senator Donna Campbell is one of the senior state legislators opposing the project. In an interview with the Voice of America, she said the site chosen for the plant is “not very windy” and that the proposed wind turbines are 700 feet tall, 200 to 300 feet higher than normal wind turbines, and that the plant is intended to have a 10,000-foot runway.

Campbell said, “The more you observe this project, the more it looks like a Trojan horse and very suspicious.” “If the Chinese Communist Party invades our infrastructure through their wind power plant, it will pose a threat to our national security. While there is no evidence yet that this Chinese company would do so, this project would put the U.S. power grid at risk. Not to mention that while they are connected to our infrastructure, they would be able to gather intelligence and learn about our Texas vulnerabilities, and it would also put other critical infrastructure in our state at risk.”

Campbell added that it’s not just companies like GH American Energy, which has ties to the Chinese military, that they’re concerned about right now, but that no Chinese company should be involved in critical U.S. infrastructure. “Because the Communist Party has a policy that any company that is owned by Chinese is subject to Communist control.”

Campbell has introduced a bill in Texas called the Lone Star Infrastructure Protection Act, which would prohibit Chinese, Russian, Iranian, North Korean and other U.S. enemy companies from getting involved in critical Texas infrastructure, the newspaper said. The bill would prohibit companies from investing in or participating in the construction of critical infrastructure in Texas, from acquiring local critical infrastructure, and from connecting to critical infrastructure in the state.

Campbell said the Texas Legislature needs to stop this “Blue Mountain Wind Power Plant” project “because it’s about the security of our nation.”

In July 2020, Texas U.S. Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Texas U.S. Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) sent a joint letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin expressing similar concerns about the Blue Mountain Wind Power Plant.

In their letter, they wrote, “Laughlin Air Force Base is a world-class U.S. Air Force pilot training ground, producing many of the people who will be the future F-35 and B-21 pilots. There is concern that a program with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, so close to the training grounds of these pilots, could threaten our nation’s competitive advantage and national security.”

The Texas Legislature has another concern, the newspaper said, and that is that the Blue Hill wind plant, when completed, will be connected to the Texas power grid. The Texas power grid is one of the three largest in the United States. They are concerned that once the Blue Hill plant is connected to the Texas grid, there is a possibility that the Chinese Communist Party will have access to important U.S. grid technology, data and hardware and software. The fear is that this will provide an opportunity for the Chinese Communist Party’s hacker network to attack the U.S. power grid and launch cyber warfare against the United States.

According to U.S. military and security experts, the main mode of future warfare will be “cyber warfare,” which includes cyber attacks on critical infrastructure such as power grids, power plants, reservoirs, oil pipelines, and public transportation, and such attacks are no less dangerous than a traditional war. For example, recently, the Colonial Pipeline’s network was attacked by the DarkSide hacker group, causing the most important fuel pipeline on the U.S. East Coast to go down and tightening fuel supplies in many places for six consecutive days.

Considered as the system rival Chinese companies in the United States all infrastructure investment will be blocked

The report said that not only the “Blue Mountain Wind Power Plant” is blocked in the U.S., but also Chinese infrastructure investment in the U.S. has been seriously blocked since 2017 due to the U.S. government’s increasing concern about infrastructure security, and will be minimal by 2020 under the Trump administration, and calls for U.S.-China cooperation in infrastructure are getting weaker. Weak.

Analysts believe that this is due to the CCP’s arrogant policy of hegemonic expansion and its refusal to comply with the rules-based international order for its own personal gain, among other things, and that the CCP has come to be seen as an institutional adversary by Western countries such as the EU and the U.S. The U.S. government is unable to see this institutional adversary as a threat to U.S. national security.

Golders, director of Cornell University’s infrastructure program, believes the new U.S. administration will continue this trend. My biggest concern is that Chinese companies become direct investors in large U.S. infrastructure projects, so that they will have a lot of control over U.S. infrastructure,” he said. This would also raise cybersecurity issues because once a Chinese-owned company takes an equity stake in U.S. infrastructure, they would have access to the computer programs, hardware, software, etc. for that infrastructure.”

He also said that good U.S. infrastructure projects always find enough bidders so that there is no need to include Chinese companies.

The newspaper said it is not difficult for U.S. state and local governments to exclude Chinese companies from regional infrastructure projects, because U.S. state and local governments have a big say in regional infrastructure projects.