The scariest part of this whole episode is that it's going to reveal how vulnerable our electrical infrastructure is to attack & how comparatively easy it is to cause enormous disruption & economic loss. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/05/us/north-carolina-power-outage-moore-county.html?smid=tw-share
North Carolina Outages: When Power Could Be Restored and Latest on Investigation

Two electric substations were damaged by gunfire on Saturday, leaving tens of thousands of customers in the dark for days. The cost of the damage is probably in the millions, one official said.

Also? I would suggest that if climate protesters attacked electrical infrastructure & left 10s of 1000s without power -- rather than a wingnut militia mad about drag queens -- this case would be getting much more attention & law enforcement resources.
https://twitter.com/malatesting/status/1600249911756263424
🦣matt🏴 on Twitter

“@chrislhayes well, i mean, the night of the attack we had J6 participant emily rainey (pictured below) posting that she knew why. sheriff ronnie fields (pictured below) looked into it and said there was nothing to see there.”

Twitter
In fact, I would suggest that if this had turned out to be a climate protest, it would dominate the news for weeks. We would hear of nothing else. Dem leaders would be called on to denounce it. Whole new punitive laws would be passed. Center lefties would convulse in horror.
But instead, it was done by reactionaries angry about drag queens. Local law enforcement & the national GOP implicitly (& sometimes explicitly) support the ideology & tactics of these reactionaries, so the whole thing is NBD.
Like I said, it's going to get real sketchy once people realize how easy it is to do big damage to electricity infrastructure. https://twitter.com/WFLA/status/1600864717182058498
WFLA NEWS on Twitter

“SUBSTATIONS TARGETED: Report shows ‘intrusions’ at Duke Energy power stations in Tampa Bay, elsewhere in Florida https://t.co/nlHzq6Z5yc”

Twitter
@drvolts Critical infrastructure should never be put on a public network (the Internet). They should be on private networks (physically separate - not VPNs).
@rob11563 That does not do anything to keep some yahoo from shooting out the insulators in a substation. (Radio has the same issue, and some stations actually surrounded their antenna bases with walls or baffles to attenuate projectiles -- but there are far more electrical substations and transmission lines than radio transmitters.)
@wollman True. I should have read the article. I did glance at the tweet and just assumed the "intrusions" were into their computer systems.