Blackouts cause people a lot of trouble. But building physical protection against attacks like the Metcalf transformer shooting would be expensive, and people already complain their electricity bills are too high. Given the choice between a 10% higher bill and a 1% greater annual chance of a blackout, which would most people choose?

The article focuses on solutions involving physical security. Perhaps it would be more cost-effective to bolster deterrents? For example, life in prison for anyone convicted of sabotaging a major facility of any kind (in the Metcalf case, this could include both the shooting and the cutting of telecom fiber beforehand).

There also seems to be less focus on improving the resilience of the system as a whole--given that the threats are being modeled to determine minimum amounts of sabotage required, why not emphasize increasing that minimum, rather than reinforcing the few critical points of failure? Computing has moved in the direction of resilient systems made of less reliable components, and so could the grid.

As an aside, a blackout in summertime can be pretty interesting. The one in 2003 brought people together in new ways--I experienced a sense of community which was quite unusual, "old fashioned" you might say.