By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

Because I need another thing to keep me up at night….

The Department of Homeland Security this week revealed that Russian hackers attacked our electrical grid last year and could have created electricity blackouts throughout the United States, thanks to our overreliance on a centralized grid.

You’d think we’d have taken the hint by now.

But no. In Washington, the geniuses at the Department of Energy are still trying to figure out how to bailout economically untenable coal and nuclear plants.

Cool.

Newsweek reporter Jason Murdock has the terrifying details:

Hackers working for a state-sponsored cyber-espionage unit with alleged links to Russia could have caused electricity blackouts in the U.S. last year after gaining access to some utility control rooms, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official disclosed this week.

Jonathan Homer, chief of industrial control system analysis at the agency, said that hackers “got to the point where they could have thrown switches” and mess with power flows, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news from a federal briefing on Monday.

The best part of this whole story is that they didn’t throw the switches. The Russian hackers were just letting us know they could gain access to them any time they wanted and throw them should they decide to do it.

So the solution is…a more centralized grid?

Maybe this report will be the wake-up call the federal government needs to realize it’s time to take seriously electrical security and move to a distributed-generation grid. Heavily solar states are already moving in that direction, and as battery costs continue to plummet, you can expect the push for a decentralized grid to intensify.

But I’m not hopeful. After all, we have put people in charge of these agencies that seem to think Russian hacking is just something we have to live with and not something we need to combat vigorously. I just fear that next time, we won’t be able to escape unscathed.

More:

Russian Hackers ‘Could Have Caused Electricity Blackouts’ In The U.S.