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Comment by consumer451 | Hacker News Reader

> We can be glad we have cars, trucks and roads that are a bit more resistant to attacks.

Now that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has occurred, and cheap armed quad-copters are a publicly known thing, I can say this openly:

Are you kidding me? Because we are still petro-centric, we are extremely fragile. For example, the West Coast has a handful of oil refineries. To shut down the West Coast's road traffic it would take one guy, and less than $10,000 in equipment. This could all be accomplished in 3 days, and there are no deployed defenses for this attack vector.

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This is one of the best non-environmental arguments I've heard for the conversion to EVs.

Thank you.

I have been trying to argue that the transition to EVs is a natsec issue for 10+ years. However, I am just some forum schmuck, and it has not been going well. Any help with moving this thinking up the chain would be greaty appreciated.

A possible analogy: The Internet was designed to be a multi-path, decentralized, and distributed communications system to withstand attack. That's what EVs are for transportation.

Wait until you hear how ridiculously easy knocking out a power substation is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL9q2lOZ1Fw&pp=ygUSaGFja2luZ...,

Meanwhile, FERC found that knocking out just nine strategically located substations, of 55,000 at the time they did the assessment in 2014, would plunge our country into darkness.

https://time.com/6244977/us-power-grid-attacks-extremism/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304020104579433...

Sure, but it's a matter of degree.

There is no way that I can be off-grid with oil. Meanwhile, 6 months after the apocalypse all oil products have degraded, and my solar panels and LiFePo batteries still have years left.

Also, post-attack, there is a huge difference in supply chain lag between setting up some solar panels vs a refinery.

Ha; no. In such a situation, you'll be lucky to be alive and not have succumbed to the $5 wrench attack. Those solar panels will be a bright red target; and in such a scenario, the police aren't driving to save you.

This is getting silly, but can you not agree that producing gasoline/diesel is more centralized than producing electricity in 2024?

If we lose 1/3 of our refineries, we lose about ~1/3 of our gasoline. The prices shoot up to ludicrous highs, but it's still there. We might have to make an expensive deal with Saudi Arabia to fill the void, but at least that's an option.

If we lose, according to FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission)... nine... of our 55,000 substations; the entire nation could lose power in almost all areas. Maybe our situation has improved since 2014, I definitely hope so, but think about this:

33% causing ~33% damage, or 0.016% causing ~90% damage. Which one is preferable?

Here's a genius idea if you're Russia. Maybe things have improved and are 10x better. In that case, knocking out 0.16% of our substations, 90 in total, in strategic locations should do the trick. Combine that with rail sabotage so the parts to fix them don't arrive, and then you've done it. Just smuggle about 500 soldiers among the 2.2 million illegal border crossings every year, and that'd be enough to assign a team of 5 to each task.

That'd make a great movie. Race against time to stop the Russian terrorists blowing up the substations, having to figure out what ones they're going for. I'd like it to come down to the last second, and then they actually manage to blow them all, and themselves, up, and then an engineer voice over explains that in 2018 they partially upgraded the system to account for transmission shifts due to renewables and they had enough redundancy near the three most important substations that reduced local blackouts to 4 hours.

Hmm, that's a solid argument. Thanks.

What I didn't include in my original argument is distributed, off-grid capture of electrons. I would still argue that a national security priority should be increasing the share of EVs and distributed PV generation. If every person, and Amazon distribution center for example, could go off-grid and continue at least partial capacity.. that would be a good thing, wouldn't it?

A "microgrid," as you are describing, could be fantastic as long as businesses or individuals aren't unreasonably constrained by their microgrid's production capability (or misguided attempts to restrict capacity in the name of climate change / equity / misguided policy here). But in theory, if all power was locally sourced and physically separate, the resiliency would be incredible.

> But in theory, if all power was locally sourced and physically separate, the resiliency would be incredible.

Thank you for phrasing my previous awkward statements so succinctly.

This should be a goal for natsec. As in, actual Defense Budget should be applied to this goal.

This is not theoretical, it is TRL 9. None of our soldiers die. We can actually do this starting today. It vastly improves our national security.

The only thing that prevents this is our fossil fuel economic inertia.

aren’t the drone defense weapons

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