[Animats]

Agreed. He's just running off press reports.

We haven't yet seen the sequence of breaker trip events. We haven't yet seen the graphs of power flows at tie points, and of frequency and voltage error.

The closest thing to a useful fact visible from Google seems to be: "The network lost 15 gigawatts of electricity generation in five seconds at around 1033 GMT, the Energy Ministry said on Monday evening, without explaining the reason for the loss." That's not a cause. Losing 15GW all at once, more power than any one plant generates, indicates some previous event had caused breaker trips somewhere. No indication of the previous event.

We do know this wasn't a supply shortage. There was plenty of generating capacity online.

Here's an analysis of the US Northeast blackout of 2003.[1] Until we start to see that level of detail, it's just blithering.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

[b112]

Unless someone diverted all that power for some purpose.

Classic scifi might be a time traveller trying to get home, or someone opening an interdimensional gateway, or maybe an AI becoming conscious and needing the power to ascend.

[Calwestjobs]

radio controlled on-load tap changers can be hacked because radio link and protocol running on it is not authenticated / encrypted