There’s no doubt in my mind that 2023… is probably going

 There’s no doubt in my mind that 2023… is probably going to be the most catastrophic when it comes to the uptick of DVE (Domestic Violent Extremist) attacks on electricity infrastructure,” Harrell said. “A number of individuals and extremist groups online right now have already signaled that this is a part of their playbook.”

One of those playbooks, with a swastika and lightning bolts on the cover, published on a social media platform by a neo-Nazi group, makes their aim quite clear.

“The main thing that keeps the anti-White system going is the powergrid,” the document reads. “This is something that is easier than you think. Peppered all over the country are power distribution substations… Sitting ducks, worthy prey.”

It’s part of a White-power philosophy called “accelerationism,” which wants to destroy society and replace it with one based on their racist ideologies.

“With the power off, when the lights don’t come back on… all hell will break lose, [sic] making conditions desirable for our race to once again take back what is ours,” they write.

The head of another accelerationist group posted on social media that these attackers have “cracked the code on lone wolf attacks.”

The attacks “check off all the necessary boxes which I didn’t think possible for lone wolf ops in USA – Frequency, sustainability, geographic concentration,” he is quoted as saying. “Law enforcement appears powerless (no pun intended) to stop them.”

A few coordinated attacks could collapse the system

These groups dream of striking exactly the right spots in the power grid, which government reports have warned for decades could cause a domino effect and leave huge parts of the country in the dark.

“If you were to target, you know, eight or nine very key nodes throughout the United States, you potentially could have a collapsing effect,” Harrell warns.

High voltage transmission power lines and substations are often spread across the country in out of the way places which can be hard to keep safe and technically challenging to secure.

“It’s inherently very difficult to harden or protect it all,” Granger Morgan, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University told CNN. “It may not take all that high tech an approach to cause physical disruption that could have very large consequences.”

Morgan is the chair of the National Academy of Science’s committee on enhancing the resilience of the nation’s power system.

“Physical attacks on major system components could cause serious physical damage, especially to large transformers and other hard to replace substation and transmission equipment such as high voltage circuit breakers,” one of his papers from 2017 warned. “Recovery could easily require many days or weeks.”