The Chinese government has spent years preparing to attack the infrastructure underpinning American life. It is exploiting the seams in our electricity system and has likely positioned hackers to cause sustained blackouts. While China’s leaders have so far practiced restraint, artificial intelligence is poised to upend that fragile balance. America’s A.I. boom, and the industry’s voracious appetite for electricity, makes the grid a highly attractive target for China and other hostile states seeking to weaken this country.

The United States must reinvent its electrical grid to protect against these evolving threats. That means adopting energy technologies that can be swiftly patched and building a more distributed grid that can quarantine and control disruption and keep essential services running if the wider grid goes down. The industry capable of delivering on all these benefits may be a surprising one: clean energy.

Solar panels and battery storage are unique because they rely on software to direct the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity rather than doing so through the spinning turbines or mechanical switches in coal and gas power plants. Modern, software-defined energy technologies can be designed from the start to receive security updates, restrict who can access them and quarantine equipment infiltrated by cybercriminals.

Texas, a leader in deploying these modern energy technologies, uses fleets of batteries to soak up surplus sun during the day. The fly in the ointment is that many of the modern energy technologies critical to resilience and national security are produced in China, the country with the most publicly confirmed interest in sabotaging our infrastructure. Congressional Republicans have urged the Trump administration to restrict the deployment of clean energy for that reason.