by Bradley L. Bartz
Torrance CA (SPX) Dec 16, 2025
In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed 4 coal-powered warships into Edo Bay and pointed their cannons at Japan. The ships belched black smoke, rattled the shoreline, and terrified a nation that had by no means seen industrial warfare up shut. Perry known as it diplomacy. The Japanese known as them the Kurofune – the Black Ships.
They labored.
Japan opened its ports, not as a result of it agreed, however as a result of it was compelled to confront overwhelming, soiled energy.
America likes to inform itself that story as triumph. However practically two centuries later, we’re crusing a brand new set of Black Ships – and this time, we’re aiming them at ourselves.
Their title is FEOC.
Phar out, man – America’s clean-energy trade simply realized it has been Phucked. Not by markets or know-how or competitors, however by coverage wielded like a gunboat: loud, blunt, and detached to collateral harm. FEOC – the Overseas Entity of Concern rule – is being enforced with all of the subtlety of a coal-fired dreadnought steaming into a contemporary harbor.
All of us knew the One Large Invoice (OBB) was coming. Written in rage, funded by oil, and shoved by means of Congress like a tantrum with a title, it was designed to kill rooftop photo voltaic by eliminating the 30 % federal credit score householders had relied on for practically twenty years. Silly, shortsighted, self-sabotaging – positive. However survivable.
What nobody anticipated was the error.
The oversight.
The second when the cannons misfired.
They forgot the batteries.
Whereas lawmakers gutted the photo voltaic credit score, they uncared for to cross-reference the standalone battery incentive. Batteries – in contrast to panels – remained eligible for a similar 30 % credit score. In a single day, the trade lurched into what installers started calling the Battery Rush. Owners realized a battery did not want sunshine. It wanted a grid connection, a fee plan, and primary math.
Cost when energy is reasonable.
Discharge when energy is extortionate.
Flatten payments.
Experience out outages.
Independence and not using a single panel on the roof.
Congress tried to kill photo voltaic and unintentionally unleashed one thing extra harmful to the previous order: vitality autonomy.
After which the Black Ships arrived.
Starting in 2026, FEOC declares that if any part of a battery traces again to China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea, the credit score vanishes. No transition interval grounded in manufacturing actuality. No acknowledgment that China controls the vast majority of the worldwide battery provide chain. Only a cannon blast throughout the bow.
The message is easy: comply or sink.
FEOC doesn’t appropriate a loophole. It obliterates the home energy-storage market – and replaces it with one thing older, dirtier, and louder.
Coal powered Perry’s ships.
Diesel powers FEOC’s future.
As a result of when batteries are blocked, the grid does not magically stabilize. It falls again on what regulators already allow: diesel turbines behind big-box shops, warehouses, information facilities, hospitals, and factories. Loud, filthy machines buzzing by means of warmth waves, blackout seasons, and local weather chaos – all to switch quiet, modular, distributed storage that already labored.
This isn’t resilience.
That is regression with a safety label.
I’ve seen this film earlier than. In Japan, a long time in the past, I watched energy constructions use worry and drive to crush innovators who moved too early and too loudly. I fired sixty staff in a single week. I nonetheless bear in mind their faces. FEOC looks like the identical logic, wearing fashionable language: punishment with out engineering, authority with out accountability.
Japan survived the Black Ships by adapting, industrializing, and finally mastering the very applied sciences that when intimidated it. America, it appears, is selecting a special lesson – crusing gunboats into its personal harbor and questioning why the dockworkers scatter.
Sunshine is a disinfectant.
Photo voltaic exposes inefficiency.
Batteries stabilize actuality.
FEOC blocks the solar – and calls the darkness safety.
Which leaves us on the finish of the experience, staring on the smoke on the horizon, asking the one query that issues now:
Who the FEOC is definitely in cost?
Associated Hyperlinks
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