By Heidi Besen/Shutterstock.com Somewhere far off in another country, a hacker infiltrated a US energy company, crippling a fuel supply line that runs 5,500 miles from New York to Texas and leaving me, like others, unsure if I’d make it home from work on the gasoline left in my tank. It is an example of the vulnerability of sole reliance on big energy. Electric grids are the big energy equivalent of the fuel line on the power side of the energy industry. They carry electricity instead of fuel, but are subject to the same kind of far-reaching calamities because of a single point of failure. So far, we haven’t experienced massive power outages because of a cyberattack, but we have — again and again — because of storms, wildfires or something as simple as a tree branch falling on a wire in the wrong place.