Washington just put the grid in the defense club

The grid just got a VIP pass

The White House’s decision to treat U.S. grid infrastructure as “essential to national defense” is the kind of policy headline that makes electrification bulls sit up a little straighter. Why? Because when Washington starts talking about the grid like it’s part of the country’s security blanket, the money trail can get very interesting very fast.

Follow the copper, not the confetti

Anthony Pompliano’s takeaway was basically: don’t stare at the utilities first — look at the suppliers feeding the machine. That means the companies making transformers, transmission lines, substations, breakers, conductors, and grid software could be the first ones to feel the tailwind.

That’s where names like Quanta Services, Eaton, Vertiv, GE Vernova, and Siemens Energy get dragged into the spotlight. And if the buildout turns into a long, expensive, grid-modernization binge, ETFs like GRID and ELFY can catch some of that flow without you having to pick a single winner like you’re drafting fantasy football for power equipment.

Why investors care

This isn’t just a “nice policy note” story. It’s a potential spending multiplier for a bunch of industrial and infrastructure names that already benefit from the AI/data-center power crunch. Goldman Sachs has also been calling for a huge jump in data-center electricity demand by 2030, which means the grid may be the bottleneck everyone ends up paying to fix.

Big picture: when the government starts treating the grid like strategic hardware, the beneficiaries aren’t just the operators — it’s the whole pickaxe-and-shovel crowd building the thing.