Members of the Texas congressional delegation, including both Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), are concerned about a wind farm planned near the Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio.
The major point that sparked their interest? The primary owner of the proposed Blue Hills Wind development has ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
That is why Sens. Cornyn and Cruz, along with Texas state Rep. Will Hurd (R-Del Rio) of the 23rd Congressional District, sent a letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on July 10. The proposed wind farm is in Val Verde County, located between the Devils River and Pecos River in the West Texas borderlands.
Texas state Rep. Will Hurd (R-Del Rio)
| https://hurd.house.gov/
The site is adjacent to Laughlin AFB, home to the 47th Flying Training Wing of the Air Education and Training Command. It trains more pilots than any other military installation in the country.
“There is concern that a project with ties to the Chinese Communist Party in such close proximity to the area where these pilots are training could threaten our competitive edge and our national security,” the letter stated. “Given the sensitive nature of this matter and in order to protect the integrity of the CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States) review process, we request that you or your staff provide a classified briefing on these reports to determine their accuracy, validity and relevance to national security.”
Daniel Hoffman wrote an article on the proposed development for Fox News, noting that GH America Investment Group purchased over 130,000 acres of property in Val Verde County in 2015.
“Local elected officials and organizations dedicated to the protection, conservation and preservation of Val Verde County have expressed reasonable concern about GH America’s plans to erect the Blue Hills Wind farm, using some of the tallest onshore turbines in the country on the land it purchased,” Hoffman wrote. “I’m a retired CIA officer and not a biologist, so I’ll leave it to the scientists for the most authoritative assessment on the extent to which GH America’s construction would decimate the fragile ecosystem, obstruct migratory flight paths, disrupt groundwater flows and degrade water quality in this area. But I will loudly ring alarm bells about the threats to our national security from GH America and its Chinese Communist Party overlords.”
Sun Guangxim, who has an estimated worth of $2 billion according to Forbes magazine, was an officer in the People’s Liberation Army and served during the Chinese invasion of Vietnam. He also was the vice chairman of the Xinjiang Provincial Youth Federation. Guangxim controls the Xinjiang Guanghui Industry Investment Group, a conglomerate which includes Guanghui Energy and China Grand Automotive Services.
Xinjiang is the location of several “re-education” camps, where Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities are detained, forced to work and have their cultural, religious and ethnic identities changed to force them to comply with government-approved beliefs.
Hurd wrote an op-ed on the proposed wind farm for the Houston Chronicle on July 30, saying that he was deeply concerned that Guanghui Energy Company might seek to gain access to the state's power grid. He said the federal government “is not moving fast enough to prevent it, and the state government lacks the power to stop it.”
Hurd said interference with the grid could be costly.
“Texas’ power grid is a complex system connecting power generators to consumers through transmission and distribution networks across the state,” he wrote. “For this complex system to be reliable, tools and techniques must estimate the state of the power grid at any one time. This prevents rolling blackouts and ensures consumers get power when they need it.
“When the Texas utility sector deregulated — resulting in the ability for any entity to provide power to the grid as long as their application was ‘administratively complete’ — those involved did not predict a company friendly with a hostile foreign government would try to connect to our power grid,” Hurd's piece continued. “Allowing an adversary to connect to our power grid enables the attacker to perform a false data injection attack — where the attacker spoofs the system’s monitoring tools to falsely think activity is happening on the grid.”
Hurd said that while most cyber professionals believe they can defend against attacks, they often fail highly sophisticated tests.
“Congress should move swiftly to implement the concept of ‘Systemically Important Critical Infrastructure,’” he wrote. “This idea and designation — recommended by the Cyberspace Solarium Commission — would enable the federal government to ‘bring to bear its unique authorities, resources and intelligence capabilities to support’ entities that operate systems like the power grid.”
If the Blue Hills Wind project is approved, it would obtain access to security industry alerts, private industry insights and national security threat assessments, Hurd said.
“This could create the ultimate fox-in-the-hen-house scenario, where we are giving an adversary our playbook and telling them which play we are running and when,” he wrote.
He said the United States should treat this development as the Chinese would a proposed American investment in their country.
“A retired U.S. general would be prevented by the Chinese government to buy land near a Chinese military base in mainland China, so why are we allowing a former general in the People’s Liberation Army of China to buy land in West Texas?” Hurd wrote. “We need a general policy of reciprocity — if American companies and investors are unable to do something in China, then Chinese companies and investors should be prevented from doing those same things here.”
