Every Infrastructure-We-All-Rely-On (electricity, water, roads, medicine, banking IT) person I've ever talked to says a variation on the same thing: it's a good thing that terrorists are so fond of "hollywood plots".
Also I guess doing serious damage to power grid isn't beyond the realms of possibility? You could of course bomb a substation, but I guess there are more subtle (and difficult to repair) ways you could inflict the damage if you took control over a small part of the grid. I guess I should stop speculating and leave the specifics to those in the know ;).
Big (and long lasting) infrastructure failures will have more damaging impact on both the local economy[0] and people's "ease of mind" than a random mall bombing.
[0] - remember the recent jwz story about power cable? How as long as it wasn't repaired, it costed the city $13k/hour? http://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-25/windmills-overload-...
I don't think this is much of an issue, though.
The grid has become so interconnected with such highly fluctuating loads that it's a miracle we haven't seen a serious outage yet.
Basically Germany uses Polish, Czech and Hungarian grids as a load leveler and as a way to transport power inside the union to countries they have deals with. But exactly those grids are amongst the oldest and weakest that we've got.
This is not a simple problem and the potential for error is much larger than you'd expect given the number of people that rely on these systems. So far so good. I personally believe that Germany should pay for the conditioning equipment to deal with the varying load of their windplants, the load patterns are a direct consequence of using wind energy and it should not fall to Germany's neighbours to fund a chunk of infrastructure that solely exists to deal with the wind surges.
In the United States every windplant has a conditioner at the uplink to make sure that the relatively fragile long distance network does not suffer. That's one single economic entity so there is no externalization possible.
The problem is economical/political - who will have the authority to say that we'll disconnect generator X and won't pay for it's electricity since noone needs it at that specific time.
But in seriousness, I find the issue interesting, but it seems solvable.
- The network is heavily loaded pre-blackout (most large networks are these days)
- A major interconnect trips out (e.g. from a tree strike or protection maloperation)
- The other line is out of service (e.g. for maintenance) or is taken out by the same event (e.g. by storms)
- Power flow is redirected through other weaker interconnects causing voltage instability
- Cascading voltage collapses take out the network
Examples: India 2012, European blackout of 2006, Indonesia 2005, northeast blackout of 2003, Italy 2003 (a bit different because the operators cocked this one up as well).
The point is that you can target one or two major transmission lines (usually in the middle of nowhere) and bring down the system. A coordinated attack on several major interconnects could really cause some damage.
(Which reminds me, I really must read that book again).
Making the electrical grid robust against deliberate attack is much more expensive and difficult than making it robust against natural disaster. Given how poorly our systems deal with natural disaster ...
It might not even worth attacking power stations. Some smart , well-educated engineers (of the kind who were recruited for the September 11 attacks) could easily point out critical chokepoints in the industrial system. Maybe there's a single plant which produces the most common antibiotics -- or maybe they all rely on a particular ingredient of which 90% is only found in one place. And so on and so forth.
Modern society -- every society -- largely works on trust and a fair amount of spit and duct tape concealed under polished chrome exteriors.
I mean, a rich, resourceful industrial society like the USA could easily spring back from even a very large, well-coordinated surprise attack by a motivated, intelligent attacker. But not before losing a lot of lives and money.
Compared to what a calculating and malicious sort of person could dream up, the attacks so far have been movie plots.
I mean heck, the Pentagon has plans for invading Canada.