Can you give some examples of? I can imagine that under the right circumstances you might succeed in blowing up some transformers or even a turbine, but it seems like you’d be up to speed within a month or two on the outside? Or am I missing the gravity somehow?

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3eb7988a1663 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Pardon? A month or two without power does not seem like an enormous crisis?

Stuxnet destroyed centrifuges. It does not seem impossible that a sophisticated attack could shred some critical equipment. During the Texas 2021 outage -they were incredibly close to losing the entire grid and being in a blackstart scenario. Estimates were that it could take weeks to bring back power - all this without any physical equipment destroyed or malicious code within the network.

Edit: Had to look it up, the Texas outage was "only" two weeks and scattershot in where it hit. The death toll is estimated at 246-702.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

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genocidicbunny 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's middle of winter, and it gets pretty danged cold. Being without power in such weather might well end up being deadly, even with short durations.

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applied_heat 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Transformers and turbines of any significance are not off the shelf parts and can have lead times of years

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sillywalk 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Transformers and turbines of any significance are not off the shelf parts and can have lead times of years

Bloomberg had a decent article[0] about transformers and their lead time. They're currently a bottleneck on building. It wasn't paywalled for me.

"The Covid-19 pandemic strained many supply chains, and most have recovered by now. The supply chain for transformers started experiencing troubles earlier — and it’s only worsened since. Instead of taking a few months to a year, the lead time for large transformer delivery is now three to five years. " [0]

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-bottlenecks-transfor...

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esafak an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

How do they not have backups??

	▲	3eb7988a1663 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Enough for the entire grid? There are some amount of reserves on hand (eg drunk runs into a telephone pole), but nothing that could replace a targeted attack with the explicit goal of taking out the most vital infrastructure.