By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

What Happened: At 10:55 am, Trump Administration officials told assembled reporters that the intelligence community

Has determined Russia is behind attempts to penetrate our electricity grid and have done so successfully.

The U.S. is sending an alert to energy companies to raise threat awareness.

SolarWakeup’s View: It’s not enough that the Russians may have hacked our elections in 2016. Now they’re trying to take down our electrical grid.

The Associated Press first reported the story and is slowly being picked up by other media outlets. The information is scarce at this point, but according to national security officials that spoke to the AP anonymously, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and other intelligence agencies have identified the Russians as being behind a series of hacks into the control centers of our electrical grid.

Officials told the AP the hacks were doing what they called “network reconnaissance” and have been rebuffed. They also told the AP they were sending out warnings to all energy companies to be on the lookout for further hacks.

But if history is any guide, now that the Russians have figured out how to do this, they will be back.

The issue of grid security and its vulnerability to cyberattacks has been in the news for a while now, and numerous reports have indicated the risk is rising. The administration’s announcement today shouldn’t surprise anyone, but it should terrify all Americans.

The chaos the Russians could wreak by causing blackouts around the country would affect nearly every single one of us, given how dependent we are on electricity to live our lives every day. Unfortunately – and frighteningly – these hacks show how woefully underprepared the United States is to defend itself against these attacks.

As we’ve discussed multiple times recently, the U.S. grid is not designed to handle 21st century electricity generation and, apparently, is unable to handle this new type of warfare – one our biggest international threat has gotten quite good at fighting.

That’s why solar is so important to our national security. As I mentioned earlier this week, a distributed generation-ready grid would make it much more difficult for centralized attacks like this to take out all the electricity production around the country at once.

And while I understand that utilities are scared of this next evolution because it could potentially put them out of business, solar is the best distributed generation technology in the electricity game.

The Trump Administration’s comments today are incredibly troubling, and it’s time we got serious about grid security. I maintain that solar is the answer to the question: How do we keep the Russians (or anyone else, for that matter) from interfering in our electrical grid?