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I grabbed this from festival - my post regarding the ongoing major power outage saga in North Carolina........

Regarding the substations being taken out - much has to do with where the bullets were placed, as well as what bullets/calibers were used.

A couple of points - the main body of a large substation transformer is quite thick - 1/2 to over an inch thick. Not easily penetrable with most types of ammo, but not impossible either.

Now, the radiators where the internal oil (and thus the transformer itself) is cooled are thinner. I’d venture to say 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick - something that can be penetrated with many rifle rounds. And from what I’m reading (they don’t seem to want to share too much information with the public), that is what may have been done.

The thing about shooting the radiator is that you can start the oil leak and be miles away before the oil drops to a level where it exposes the internal transformer windings and allows a short circuit (fault) to occur which will trip the circuit breakers protecting the transformer.

These large transformers cost a ton of money, and take months to build. They’re often fairly unique, and are thus made to order. And of course, our own manufacturers barely exist these days, being undercut by foreign entities. They’re so big that even if a replacement is available, it will take days to move it and may require special transportation permitting to carry it through many towns.

(Witness a large new transformer that was being installed near Cleveland Ohio, a couple of years ago. The transformer was brought by rail to somewhere around Seville, Ohio, then made the final ~30 miles by road on a special flatbed carrier that took up the entire road. They had to close pieces of the road for periods of time as they rolled through, and in some cases, had to raise wires and traffic signals to get the cargo through. It was, if I recall, a 2 day affair to go 30 miles, and then weeks of setup time once on site).

Getting back to this specific situation, and I’ll concentrate on the larger substation because that is where the bulk of the customer outages originated. The station has redundancy - 2 transformers, multiple incoming lines, circuit breaker arrangements - all designed so that a single point of failure will not be a disaster. In a sense, the spare transformer in this station was in service already, able to carry the entire burden if the other one failed. That’s how things have been designed and how we operate in the power industry - always able to withstand a single failure without major cascading effects on the rest of the grid. And even in this case, outside of that area, nobody was effected.

The problem, of course, is such a large area was vulnerable to 2 or more catastrophic failures of equipment. I didn’t see anything written about explosions or that kind of damage, so there is potentially some salvageable equipment that can be returned to service, once external repairs and testing are completed. Technically, this would NOT be considered a single point of failure, since more than one piece of equipment failed/was damaged, but there is vulnerability in that the equipment that was damaged was all at one location.

In the past, the utility industry has done well to protect against natural disasters and the occasional accident - weather, ice storms, hurricanes, tornadoes - but sabotage, while on the radar, has maybe not been given the credence it deserves until recently. Seems that we used to be a much less volatile nation. That is the biggest issue - the system is resilient to natural events for the most part, short of the total devastation of something like Hurricane Ian, but it isn’t necessarily as strong for sabotage events such as this.

Preparing for events such as this requires a lot of things - building out more redundancy, which we already do to an extent, buying and having more spare parts (there are a ton of spare distribution poles, insulators, transformers, etc in stock at virtually every utility in the country because that is the stuff that breaks most often). But this large transmission equipment is expensive, and nobody wants a power line in their back yard. And nobody wants to pay for having too many big spare parts on hand (though some people don’t seem to mind paying through the nose for pie-in-the-sky green BS energy ventures).

“I got used to 8.5 cents/KWh a few years ago, but it is nothing close to that now. How much more are those SOBs going to charge me for something that probably won’t ever happen?” - that’s the ratepayer’s mindset.