HAH!

Probably not, because it just happened and I only heard about it in the comments from Jane Gault.

When I went looking to see what I could find on it, I was like, "HOLY SMOKES!" Two of my favorite riffs in one story, and good grief, what a story.

Things are really getting weird around here.

Now, I guess most of this happened over the course of the past few months, and he'd been arrested July 11. 

But we're only aware of it because the Justice Department - yeah, the Feds - announced charges against this guy yesterday.

Apparently this Jordanian immigrant in Orlando, FL, Hashem Younis Hashem Hnaihen, 43, had been a busy guy through June. And he really, REALLY hates Israel.

...According to court records, Hnaihen began smashing the windows of several businesses in the Orlando area and leaving “warning letters” threatening to “destroy or explode everything here in whole America. Especially the companies and factories that support the racist state of Israel.”

...Hnaihen also attempted to purchase a firearm and lied about his lack of US citizenship, prosecutors say. During a background check, however, prosecutors say the issue was discovered and Hnaihen was not able to purchase the weapon.

A little nitpick here - I think lying about your citizenship on a gun application should be a red-flag call to the cops, and you then wind up hauled off to the hoosgow and deported. But that's just me. 

Back to the story.

Whatever momentary release Hnaihen got from hearing the businesses' glass hit the sidewalk obviously wasn't enough to soothe his anti-Semitic lashing-out fever. So the fellow took his hammer act to a local solar panel farm to continue cutting up in the name of Jew hate.

How he went about it is the interesting and hideously expensive thing. Hnaihen didn't just punch holes in panels. He also dyked wires and did so strategically, managing to pile up a whale of a repair bill in a short period of time - like he knew precisely what he was doing and how to inflict maximum damage in minimum order.

And then he dropped a couple of his "I hate Israel" letters for good measure,

...Hnaihen also attacked a Florida solar panel farm, smashing panels and cutting wires, court records say.

"The solar farm’s engineers and law enforcement investigators quickly realized that Hnaihen's attack bore signs of premeditation and sophistication," prosecutors wrote in a detention memo. "For example, whenever Hnaihen cut a wire, he would cut so close to the panel that it was impossible to splice in a new wire, permanently decommissioning the entire panel."

In two hours, he caused $700,000 in damages, prosecutors say.

Another one of the threatening calling letters Hnaihen was known for was found posted outside an Orlando industrial propane gas depot on the 9th of July. Fortunately, nothing was damaged or found to be dangerous, but it shut the place down for quite a while as hazmat and related teams cleared the facility.

I'll bet it was scary.

I have read he was here "lawfully" having arrived on a tourist visa years ago. If so, why's he still here, and how is that lawful if he overstayed it? I think they are still ironing that part out, honestly. 

The feds are hitting him with four counts and no bail. 

Hashem Younis Hashem Hnaihen, 43, a Jordanian citizen residing in Orlando, Florida, is charged with four counts of threatening to use explosives and one count of destruction of an energy facility. At his detention hearing yesterday, Hnaihen was ordered detained pending trial.

“We allege that the defendant threatened to carry out hate-fueled mass violence in our country, motivated in part by a desire to target businesses for their perceived support of Israel,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “Such acts and threats of violence, whether they are targeting the places that Americans frequent every day or our country’s critical infrastructure, are extremely dangerous and will not be tolerated by the Justice Department.”

...Following a multiagency effort, law enforcement identified Hnaihen and arrested him on July 11, shortly after another “Warning Letter” threatening to “destroy or explode everything” was discovered at an industrial propane gas distribution depot in Orlando.

Hnaihen is charged with four counts of threatening to use explosives and one count of destruction of an energy facility. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison for each threat offense and a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for the destruction of an energy facility offense.

So, one violent loon in an unguarded solar farm tore up $700 grand worth of gear, and I haven't been able to see how much production was knocked offline. From the red grids on the one photo of the field, it's significant.

I wonder what deliberate damage with, like, heavy equipment could do to panels.

Wait a minute - someone did that to an 'about to go live' solar farm in Maine just last month.

There were no security cameras. I don't believe there were any hefty security measures in place at the Orlando farm, either, which is not surprising in the least for these passive facilities.

Most of these installations are too sprawling and too isolated to have a security presence like a normal power plant would have. Some of these farms, like the one hammered by the hailstorms in Texas, are hundreds of thousands of panels on thousands of acres.

No one can watch them, and the insurance bill when things go awry at that magnitude of damage is tremendous.

This is where "green" starts costing real "greenbacks" - the utility customer will be paying...and paying and paying to replace these really vulnerable arrays. Be it vandalism, Mother Nature, or the nature of the panels themselves, these solar installations (and wind farms) have weaknesses that traditional power generation sources do not, besides their inherent reliability issues.

The hail-damaged farm above has over half a million panels, and nearly every one of them roached. Where do they put the destroyed panels?

Same for the farm in Maine and Orlando. Where are all these going?

If, say, New England states insist on becoming more reliant on solar thanks to their artificially created NetZero goals, what happens when vandals or Mother Nature takes out a whole farm? Who picks up the slack as they're decommissioning reliable sources faster than they can bring on renewable replacements now?

If all it takes is one whackjob with a grudge, a hammer, and a pair of dykes...I dunno.

What does the security posture for the future look like when you're talking about safeguarding literally hundreds of thousands of miles of cells?

Someone might want to rethink the plan.