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Old 11-28-2018, 07:12 PM
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StainlessSteelCynic StainlessSteelCynic is offline
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Location: Western Australia
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Loss of electricity is going to be a massive impact but considering that we still had many coal-fired power stations and plenty of coal mines that doesn't appear to be a problem.
So we have to interrupt the transport of coal to the stations. The easiest way would be an automobile fuel crisis... ah look at that, right back to were we started!

Like you said, it's tricky. With so much of our infrastructure spread out over a massive continent, what happens in one part of the country often has no impact what-so-ever on other parts of the country. For example, disruptions to the electricity supply in Victoria won't make any impact on electricity for South Aus because our power grids aren't shared by multiple states like in Europe or North America.
But... disruption of electricity to those cities that have fuel refineries, that would be an impact on the rest of the nation. Hmm, coming full circle here...

Many years ago, a mate of mine worked for the State Energy Commission of Western Australia (SECWA was a government body that was later split into two corporations, one controls electricity, the other LPG).
Anyway, in the early 1990s he mentioned one time that the Perth electricity grid relied on four major transformers to distribute power. If one of them broke down the other three would handle things, if two broke down, there would be minor disruptions and some inconvenience to the public. If three went offline, major sections of the city would have to suffer rolling blackouts as they tried to share the power around and electricity would have to be sent from rural power stations via country power lines (which are mostly low capacity lines).

The kicker was that those transformers were made in Europe (France I think) and took approximately one year to build and transport to Australia. They are heavy duty and apparently consist of a lot of solid-state components so they aren't prone to breakdowns.
However, military sabotage would take them offline and probably quite easily.
With that in mind, when my battalion was doing LLOps, part of our training involved protection of power stations and transformers.

A successful sabotage campaign targetting the electrical system in those cities with fuel refineries along with hitting the refineries would be exceedingly difficult to cope with. No electricity and the average city dweller is screwed but no electricity for the refineries means no fuel. No fuel, no transport. No transport, no coal for the power stations, no food deliveries, no resupply for the military etc. etc. etc.
Throw in some bushfires and limited fuel for the fire service, some sabotage of the isolated sections of the railway network to disrupt other goods & services and we have a pretty good start to a Twilight-friendly scenario for a stuffed up Australia
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