You may well be right.

This is the first time I've heard any major outage blamed on "hackers".
Ususally such blackouts are caused by combination of lack of investment and/or lack of knowledge (but that's another argument).

Is there any evidence whatsoever that hackers were involved?

Physical or absolute separation of the various networks is a good idea in theory.
In practice, separation is exceptionally difficult to maintain:

1. There's always non-critical data to collect. Long term trends, maybe some environmental data, some trial project for some new tech. This stuff is (quite rightly) kept away from the mission critical networks and usually goes over the internet.
2. The mission-critical guys then find that this non critical data is useful/relevant to what they do. Maybe it's just a weather forecast, something like that. So they end up having access to the non-critical information. It's usually too hard/too expensive to make intangible data sources available through the mission-critical systems (changes are expensive and you don't know what the benfit is until you try it...). So, they'll get access in informal ways. It starts with printouts, then a "separate" screen in the control room, then maybe an info display on their main screen and before you know it, you've started to breach the separation. Still, nothing too disastrous at this point.
3. The next stage is that this extra information proves so useful that the idea of automation comes in. "Hey, look: if we merge this data source with this data source, we can have the system make a decision for us and it'll ease the workload of the mission critical people". At this point, you've now got mission critical data and other data all routed into the same decision box, running *unsupervised*. No-one really knows what's going on (in real time) and this is where the hackers can start to play.

I'm not sure what the solution is. The message is "Don't rely on separation to protect you." It *will* be breached. The day-to-day business processes in a utility will take care of that...

Because when the line breaks/falls down/gets struck by lightning, you lose your vital communications right when you most need them.

It's usually a good idea to have the control channel physically separate from the thing you are controlling...

Maybe. Your argument is fine if there's nothing you need to supply with electricity any place between the two end points.
Transmission systems usually need to provide tap-off points along the way - something that is difficult and/or expensive with DC.

There's no major bias or ignorance involved; when DC is cheaper, they use DC. It's just that in the majority of cases, AC is the most appropriate solution.

Agreed. But nuclear is somewhat useless without a fairly large electricity transmission system. You've gotta get rid of all that energy somehow.

Nuclear plants are only happy working 100% day and night. You can't just turn these things up & down like a coal plant.

It's like the problem of managing wind power, only reversed...

Concerned? Nah, not really.

The current incumbents are so fekking incapable they would struggle to work out which end of a USB stick goes where. The chances of them implementing *any* form of large scale IT system is zero. Zip . Nada. Not gonna happen.

They'll be out of office in a year or so anyway.

Holy Cow, are you saying that if there's a CDFS partition on the drive, the program specified by autorun.inf will run *regardless* of any settings?

Wow. I guess that "feature" will be coming to the next evolution of Conficker in, say, some time in the next 5 minutes?

Not quite. If you've paid a lot of money for a clean energy generator, you don't have the luxury of just using whenever you happen to need it. It's too expensive. You need that baby to be working flat out, 24/7, 265 days a year - otherwise it's just not cost-competitive with the centralised power plants that DO work all the time.

It's even worse with intermittent sources like wind. As soon as the wind blows, you need to be selling/using that electricity 100% to make it pay. "Make hay while the sun shines", etc.

If you don't need the electricity around the clock, you need to be able to sell it to people who do. And to do that, you need a very good transmission system that gets the power right to whoever happens to need it any time of day or night (you can't store this stuff, remember?) The net effect is a big increase on demand on the grid, usually right in the places where the infrastructure is weakest - at the tail-end of the grid. This is what the article is trying to explain.