> Taking down a power station is certainly a viable attack vector, but the damage caused by losing a single station is drastically more manageable than losing a

> Taking down a power station is certainly a viable attack vector, but the damage caused by losing a single station is drastically more manageable than losing a key pipeline that a massive region of the continent needs to feed continuously from to keep civilization running. It depends on which power station. For instance, in my country, something like a tenth of the power of the whole country comes from a single place, the Itaipu hydroelectric dam. Most power from it flows through just a few power stations. In 2009, a weather-caused triple fault at one of them left half of the whole country, and the whole neighboring country, without power for a few hours (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Brazil_and_Paraguay_blackout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Brazil_and_Paraguay_black...). (Not to mention that the long-distance HVDC power lines used to bring power from distant hydroelectric dams like the Belo Monte dam and the Madeira river dams do also have a "huge upfront cost and maintenance requirements". Given that the power loss is lower at higher voltages, and these dams are so far from the southeast where most power demand is, the incentives are to build them as big as possible.)