I wrote earlier in this series about Minnesota's 2040 carbon-free law — and about the reliability off-ramp written into it that almost nobody cites. My position on the pace of the transition is the one I laid out there: keep the destination, watch the gauges. Tie the timeline to a public reliability-and-affordability dashboard, use the statutory off-ramp honestly if the lights are actually at risk, and stop pretending the choice is between freezing in the dark and torching the goal.
But I want to add an argument that's been missing from the energy debate, and I want to aim it specifically at conservatives, because I think it's their argument and they've been leaving it on the table.
The grid we have is a target
Picture how Minnesota's electricity actually reaches you: a handful of very large generating plants, feeding high-voltage lines, feeding a few hundred substations, feeding your neighborhood. It's efficient. It's also centralized — which, in security terms, is another word for fragile. A system with a few giant nodes is a system where a few giant nodes are all an adversary needs.
This isn't theoretical. In 2013, snipers shot up a transformer substation in California and nearly took down power to Silicon Valley; the attack was never solved and federal regulators called it the most significant incident of domestic terrorism against the grid to that point. In 2022, gunfire on substations in North Carolina cut power to tens of thousands of people for days. Federal agencies have warned for years that the grid's large transformers are custom-built, slow to replace, and few in number — that a coordinated attack on a small number of them could black out a region for months. And that's before you get to cyber-intrusions, which have already probed and, abroad, actually taken down grids. A hostile state that wants to hurt America in the middle of a Minnesota January doesn't need to invade. It needs to hit a few substations.
Distributed power is the defense
Now picture the alternative. A grid where a meaningful share of power is generated where it's used — rooftop solar on homes and businesses, batteries in garages and basements, community microgrids that can island themselves and keep a hospital, a water plant, or a neighborhood running when the big lines go down. There's no single point of failure, because there's no single point. An attacker who takes out a substation blacks out a much smaller area, for a much shorter time, because the neighborhood downstream is partly powering itself. That is resilience, and resilience is what national security is made of.
This is why I say home power production is a security matter. A family with solar and a battery isn't just saving on a utility bill. They're a node that keeps working when the network is attacked. Multiply that by a million Minnesota households and you've built something no adversary can knock out with a rifle or a keyboard: a grid too distributed to break.
Why conservatives should own this
Here's the part I'd say to a conservative audience directly. You don't have to believe a word about climate to want this. You believe in hardening the country against its enemies. You believe in self-reliance — the household that can keep its own lights on. You believe in not depending on a fragile, centralized system controlled by a few big institutions. Distributed generation is all three. The clean-energy crowd has spent twenty years selling rooftop solar as an environmental virtue, and lost half the country doing it. Sell it as what it also is — a defense against the blackout an adversary would love to cause — and the coalition doubles overnight.
The honest concession
To the security hawks: distributed generation is a complement, not a total replacement — you still need large plants and transmission, and this series has been honest that transmission is the real bottleneck. To the clean-energy side: framing solar as security means the security rationale has to be real, which means hardening substations and cyber-defenses too, not just adding panels. And to ratepayers: distributed power has upfront costs, and the dashboard I'm proposing is precisely so those costs stay visible and honest.
What I'd actually do
Publish the reliability-and-affordability dashboard and tie the 2040 pace to it, using the law's own off-ramp honestly.
Treat distributed generation as critical infrastructure — fund rooftop solar, home batteries, and community microgrids as resilience investments, with priority for hospitals, water systems, and emergency services.
Harden the centralized backbone too — substation physical security and cyber-defense, so we're not just adding nodes but protecting the network they hang on.
Make the security case out loud, to every audience, in security terms.
A centralized grid is a target. A distributed one is a defense. Keep the destination, watch the gauges — and build the grid an enemy can't turn off.
First the facts. Then the fix.
Sources
This is a policy position. Minnesota's carbon-free standard and its reliability off-ramp: Minn. Stat. § 216B.1691, subd. 2b, as documented in this series' grid article. Grid-attack incidents: the April 2013 Metcalf (PG&E) substation sniper attack near San Jose, California, later described by the then-FERC chairman as the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid; the December 2022 Moore County, North Carolina substation shootings that cut power to roughly 45,000 customers for days; federal assessments (Department of Energy, DHS/CISA, and NERC) on large-power-transformer scarcity and physical/cyber vulnerability, including the 2015 and 2016 cyberattacks on Ukraine's grid as demonstrated capability. Distributed-generation resilience concepts (islanding microgrids for critical facilities) are documented by the Department of Energy and national laboratories.
Incident details are characterized from widely reported public records and federal assessments and were not re-verified against primary documents this pass; confirm dates and figures before citing them as specific authority. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.