The pattern of industrializing and developing societies is towards urbanization and the movement of populations into cities, where economic activity can concentrate and intensify. This is expressed materially in the modern age by the high-rise building in particular, maximizing density by building upward. But consider what is necessary for the high-rise to function.
Setting aside the massive amounts of energy required to produce and manipulate the concrete and steel, and other materials required to fight gravity, you do have to continually move people and materials upward and outward. The production of food and water happens in the soil and down low: it is literally subjected to the laws of gravity. With people living up high off of the ground, they must be able to return to the ground and access further and further outward the reproduction of their resources, which requires energy in its various forms, and then of course they must be returned with the added mass of their retrieved goods.
Elevators and transportation are one thing. But one of the more interesting aspects of a high-rise building is the movement of water itself. To get water to people living stories upon stories above ground, you need electricity and mechanical action. It simply wouldn't make sense to expend muscle energy carrying water up even a single story on a daily basis. Electricity of course moves right up the copper wiring that carries it, and heat rises, so hot air has no problem finding its way up the duct work that transports it. Water on the other hand is heavy, and as a fluid, it is a little trickier to get it from place to place without losing it. And you actually need a lot of it: it goes quick when you drink it, use it to bathe, to clean and renew cooking utensils and clothing, and etc.
It can be done on lower technological tranches of course, but a separate problem is the constant expansion of industrial hegemons and their rivals, so that there must be a constant acceleration of motion and efficiency in economic activity.
To achieve the constant circulation of water then, it is typically lifted by mechanical pump, powered by electricity, to the roof, where it is then allowed to fall back down, directed to the various tenements on the way down. An artificial gravity feed. All of this requires pipe infrastructure too, which must be produced offsite and transported in and perpetually maintained, which involves piping and joinery and seals and gaskets and all the rest.
The production of electricity then becomes a hard necessity, all the more so because of its efficiency and transferrable nature, so that the whole of society, looking for constant increasing motion, becomes tooled for it - and this is only one of many ways that necessity is expressed - for an industrialized society which wishes to remain perched high enough on the value chain to command domestic legitimacy for consumption and foreign legitimacy for war making. No wonder then that it is targeted as a sort of Achilles heel in modern military doctrines. That and the supply chain: one can cut off electricity by also cutting off the reproduction of its engines, by denying parts and materials needed to replace them.
We could expect then an intensification of attacks on those elements, as well as a strengthening and shoring up of their protection.
