You don't need to take out hundreds of plants. Typically you might only need to cause a few targeted failures at the right time, and if you do this in a nasty

You don't need to take out hundreds of plants. Typically you might only need to cause a few targeted failures at the right time, and if you do this in a nasty way you can cause a cascading failure, taking out key transmission lines or other nodes in the network. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure * Structural Vulnerability of the North American Power Grid - http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0401084v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0401084v1.pdf * Risk-aware Attacks and Catastrophic Cascading Failures in U.S. Power Grid - http://www.ele.uri.edu/nest/paper/Globecom_2011.pdf http://www.ele.uri.edu/nest/paper/Globecom_2011.pdf It's a very "Dr Evil" topic, I know...