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Comment by bronco21016 | Hacker News Reader

By that logic literally everything should be distributed. That's going to be a big undertaking to re-architect our entire civilian infrastructure against that.

I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, I just don't see society taking that measure until it's either 1) cheaper, or 2) the threat moves from being just a threat to reality.

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> 2) the threat moves from being just a threat to reality.

Completely agree. But I'm already there. Large scale economic disruption has just started. For that to remain peaceful over the next few decades would be a miracle. So we should plan for disruption, for which energy decentralization is a keystone, and the technology to make it practical is here.

California has a 600 MW Virtual Power Plant composed of Tesla Powerwall batteries in 85k homes. Central control of distributed generation removes a lot of inefficiencies. Household excess is available to the whole system.

Has no one been paying attention to how Ukraine/Russia and now Iran has been targeting civilian infrastructure? All of Spain's electricity was down last year from a cyberattack. This is completely a new line of threat that we need to address.

Can you source your claim that Spain's electricity was down from a cyberattack? Because that never happened.

https://www.entsoe.eu/news/2026/03/20/entso-e-publishes-expe...

There are significantly better targets than fields of solar panels. There are 132 oil refineries in the country. Taking out even one would have immediate repercussions to energy security which are not easily rectified.

There are probably only a handful of backbone transmission routes which serve tens of millions of people. These are isolated and unprotected and could likely be disabled with a loaded truck plowing into a critical piece of infrastructure.

There are things called distribution yards, they are very distinct on google maps, can't be hidden. They were successfully targeted by US in 1990s Yugoslavia war.

It does not take much to bring down electricity distribution.

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