There are a shitload of them in the US (55,000 or more), but there is an eight-year-old story that holds that destroying nine of them would take out the American grid and that a hundred are labelled as "critical".
I'm not sure how one can secure substations. One would have to ballistially protect every transformer from rifle fire, keep people from forcing the gates and keep them from damaging the phone/data lines into the substations. As for armed guards, well, having guys stand around for years on end with nothing ever happening is a tall order to fill.
A could of decades ago, I frequently drove by a large substation. It occurred to me that a couple of guys with armor-piercing ammunition could wreak havoc. It's an idea that wasn't completely original to me; in Red Storm Rising, after the Soviets invaded Iceland, F-111s blow up the substations in Reykjavik to put the Russians in the dark.
Anyhoo, one of the officials in North Carolina expressed a hope that, if they catch the goobers who shot up those substations, that they get put in a cell with no power. My thought was the exact opposite: They should beplaced in a cell with a lot of power. Especially in their chair.
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Looked a lot like a dry run.
I don't know, Jon, these people aren't very smart. I think we got lucky, that this was no more than blindly ripping the gate off its hinges and shooting the shit out of the place. Like maybe they watched one too many Rambo movies. The A Team. From ripping the gate off its hinges to the sheriff praying to the catholic dog with the self-avowed perp, there's no sophistication to it, no indication they knew what they had the potential to do. For that matter, given the area of outage, they may be the ones that got lucky. It ain't over yet.
Based, of course, on the information is available to us.
I still don't think we should be giving anyone ideas ...
There are general instances and there are specific instances. Both are covered here:
Moore County Sheriff Ronnie Fields agreed, saying, “The individual that [did] the damage knew exactly what they were doing to cause the damage and cause the outage that they did.”
https://www.cbs17.com/news/north-carolina-news/other-states-reporting-power-outage-attacks-similar-to-north-carolina-moore-county-document-says/
Rita Katz has a similar view:
"If this was indeed a far-right terrorist attack, my worry is that it will serve as a proof of concept for other far-right extremists."
https://twitter.com/Rita_Katz?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Katz
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