The U.S. power grid has become the primary target for white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups in the United States.

The FBI announced on Feb. 6 that they thwarted an attack on Baltimore’s power grid by a Sarah Beth Clendaniel of Maryland conspiring with Brandon Russell, the head of a small neo-Nazi group in Florida.

The two communicated on encrypted apps where Russell allegedly shared links to maps with locations of electrical substations telling Clendaniel that a small number of attacks could cause a “cascading failure”.

He allegedly encouraged using mylar balloons to short out a power transformer and encouraged attacks when the grid is facing the greatest strains such as “when everyone is using electricity to either heat or cool their homes.”

Clendaniel allegedly discussed the rifle she would use in an attack and said that hitting a number of substations in one day with “four or five shots through the center of them” would “probably permanently completely lay this city to waste”.

“If we can pull off what I’m hoping… this would be legendary,” Clendaniel said to a federal informant, according to the criminal complaint against her.

ACCELERATIONISTS AND THE RISE IN CASES

The latest case is just one of a number of recent attacks on U.S. energy infrastructure. These cases also follow an uptick in online chatter by white supremacist “accelerationist” groups about targeting power stations.

The term accelerationist was first used by science fiction writer Roger Zelazny in his 1967 novel “Lord of Light”. In the book, a group of revolutionaries called accelerationists wanted to transform society through its attitudes to technology, the Guardian reports.

Over the last 50 years the initial belief has morphed into an intellectual movement that extolls the speeding up of technology and capitalism to create more-equitable and collective systems of living. Others believe that technology should be sped up to create the most most oppressive and divisive form of society form of society and capitalism in order to compel people to create a more just world.

Meanwhile, neo-Nazis and far-right accelerationists use the term to describe their philosophy of sowing chaos through violence with the ultimate goal of societal collapse and an eventual race war in the United States. Their chaos-initiating choice at the moment favors disrupting power stations.

In December 2022, two substations in North Carolina were attacked by gunfire causing power outages to 45,000 people. Officials said the attack was targeted and no arrests have been made.

Since June 2022, there have been 15 unsolved targeted attacks on power stations with at least two of them involving gunfire, according to an investigative report by OPB and KUOW.

In 2022, three white supremacists from Wisconsin, Ohio and Texas, pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorists in a plot to attack power grids with rifles to further a white supremacist ideology.

In 2021 five neo-Nazis were charged for conspiracy to damage an energy facility in the United States. They were members of the now defunct “Iron March” online forum for young neo-Nazis. Two of them were former Marines. The Justice Department also said the five discussed using homemade Thermite, a material that burns at over 4000°F to burn through and destroy power transformers.

They allegedly planned the power outages to create “general chaos and to provide cover and ease of escape in those areas in which they planned to undertake assassinations and other desired operations to further their goal of creating a white ethno-state,” prosecutors said.

In 2020, law enforcement officials found a drone on top of a building next to a Pennsylvania power substation with ropes hanging from it attached to a two-foot piece of copper wire. Officials said it was likely intended to short circuit the substation. Any identification information on the drone was removed.

EXPERT WARNINGS

The focus of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups on taking down the U.S. electrical grid has been documented many times.

In an analysis of 94 cases of people charged in U.S. federal courts from 2016-2022, researchers Ilana Krill and Bennett Clifford at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism found that 55 (59%) were by white supremacists and 39 (41%) by jihadists.

Attack planning by white supremacists have dramatically also increased from 2016-2022, while such planning by jihadists have decreased, the report found.

The two groups also targeted widely different types of critical infrastructure. Jihadists focused on commercial facilities, government facilities, and emergency services, while white supremacists focused on the energy sector. This difference was statistically significant, the report says.

Among white supremacists, the energy sector was the target of 13 of the 16 cases involving neo-Nazis, or 87 percent. Moreover, most of those cases of involved people charged after 2020 and include plans to attack power lines, the energy grid and even a nuclear reactor.

The report says the data is in line with the rise of accelerationism, which represents a shift within U.S. white supremacist adherents towards specifically targeting energy systems.

“For the past several years, white supremacist propaganda and its associated online ecosystem have both honed in on energy facilities, encouraging supporters of the movement to conduct attacks on energy supply, in the hopes that it will trigger a cataclysmic confrontation in American society and collapse the country from within,” the report says.