There is no way that I can be off-grid with oil. Meanwhile, 6 months after the apocalypse all oil products have degraded, and my solar panels and LiFePo batteries still have years left.
Also, post-attack, there is a huge difference in supply chain lag between setting up some solar panels vs a refinery.
Ha; no. In such a situation, you'll be lucky to be alive and not have succumbed to the $5 wrench attack. Those solar panels will be a bright red target; and in such a scenario, the police aren't driving to save you.
If we lose 1/3 of our refineries, we lose about ~1/3 of our gasoline. The prices shoot up to ludicrous highs, but it's still there. We might have to make an expensive deal with Saudi Arabia to fill the void, but at least that's an option.
If we lose, according to FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission)... nine... of our 55,000 substations; the entire nation could lose power in almost all areas. Maybe our situation has improved since 2014, I definitely hope so, but think about this:
33% causing ~33% damage, or 0.016% causing ~90% damage. Which one is preferable?
Here's a genius idea if you're Russia. Maybe things have improved and are 10x better. In that case, knocking out 0.16% of our substations, 90 in total, in strategic locations should do the trick. Combine that with rail sabotage so the parts to fix them don't arrive, and then you've done it. Just smuggle about 500 soldiers among the 2.2 million illegal border crossings every year, and that'd be enough to assign a team of 5 to each task.
That'd make a great movie. Race against time to stop the Russian terrorists blowing up the substations, having to figure out what ones they're going for. I'd like it to come down to the last second, and then they actually manage to blow them all, and themselves, up, and then an engineer voice over explains that in 2018 they partially upgraded the system to account for transmission shifts due to renewables and they had enough redundancy near the three most important substations that reduced local blackouts to 4 hours.
What I didn't include in my original argument is distributed, off-grid capture of electrons. I would still argue that a national security priority should be increasing the share of EVs and distributed PV generation. If every person, and Amazon distribution center for example, could go off-grid and continue at least partial capacity.. that would be a good thing, wouldn't it?
A "microgrid," as you are describing, could be fantastic as long as businesses or individuals aren't unreasonably constrained by their microgrid's production capability (or misguided attempts to restrict capacity in the name of climate change / equity / misguided policy here). But in theory, if all power was locally sourced and physically separate, the resiliency would be incredible.
There is no way that I can be off-grid with oil. Meanwhile, 6 months after the apocalypse all oil products have degraded, and my solar panels and LiFePo batteries still have years left.
Also, post-attack, there is a huge difference in supply chain lag between setting up some solar panels vs a refinery.