Two Grid-Sabotage Attacks in Twelve Hours Hit Turnow-Preilack and Bergheim, Tripping Five Lignite Blocks
Berlin, 3 September 2026
Key points
- At about 08:00 on 1 September, improvised launchers fired conductive material into 380-kilovolt lines at 50Hertz's Turnow-Preilack substation in Brandenburg, next to the Jänschwalde lignite plant; two short-circuits succeeded and a double-digit number of unfired explosive and incendiary devices were seized on site
- About twelve hours later, at roughly 20:00, a short-circuit at Amprion's Rommerskirchen substation near Bergheim, west of Cologne, took five RWE lignite blocks off the grid — Niederaußem H, G and K and Neurath G and F, about 4,200 megawatts of capacity feeding roughly 3,000 megawatts into the grid at the time
- Police found six launch devices in a maize field beside the Bergheim substation, built to throw a conductive wire over the overhead lines on a pyrotechnic charge; three of the five blocks were back by Wednesday evening, RWE Power says block K will not return before the following Tuesday
- North Rhine-Westphalia's interior minister Herbert Reul said investigators are "relatively certain there are many parallels" between the sites and named two lines of inquiry, "state-directed sabotage from abroad and left-wing extremism"; Brandenburg's case runs under section 129a of the criminal code, formation of a terrorist organisation, alongside sabotage and explosives provisions
- No claim of responsibility has been made at either site, no suspect has been named, and no federal authority has taken over either investigation as of 3 September
Germany's transmission grid absorbed two sabotage attacks on high-voltage substations within twelve hours on 1 September — Brandenburg's Turnow-Preilack in the morning, North Rhine-Westphalia's Rommerskirchen near Bergheim in the evening — the second tripping five RWE lignite blocks worth roughly 4,200 megawatts, with investigators citing hardware parallels but no attribution.
Both incidents used the same method: improvised launchers designed to throw conductive material — wire or projectiles — onto overhead lines to force a short-circuit, rather than physically damaging pylons or substations. At Turnow-Preilack, 50Hertz reported only a brief interruption with all lines since restored; Brandenburg's interior minister Jan Redmann called the double-digit device count "damn good luck" that only one produced a short-circuit, and said the devices could have been installed days before the attack, requiring the perpetrators to have scouted and returned to the site. At Bergheim, Amprion said general supply "was not affected at any time" and system stability "was always guaranteed", but the outage was larger in absolute terms: about three gigawatts of RWE lignite generation went offline for hours, with one block not expected back for a week.
Jurisdiction has stayed local. The Cologne prosecutor's office is investigating anti-constitutional sabotage and disruption of public operations at Bergheim; the Brandenburg Landeskriminalamt leads at Turnow-Preilack under section 129a, sabotage and explosives statutes. Tagesspiegel reports the Federal Prosecutor General — who took the Leipzig/Halle drone case two days after that find — is examining whether to take over the grid attacks; as of 3 September it had not. Reul's "state-directed sabotage from abroad and left-wing extremism" formulation keeps both lines of inquiry open rather than pointing at either.
Three attacks on German infrastructure in a month: one attributed to Russia by name, two attributed to no one. Berlin's 1 September statement named Russia for the Leipzig/Halle drone found a month earlier, but the grid attacks that followed within days carry only "parallels" and two open lines of inquiry — a narrower official posture than the one taken on the airport case, despite launch devices of similar build at both sites. Großwald's Signal No. 136 logged Turnow-Preilack as unattributed on the day it happened; a takeover by the federal prosecutor general, which Tagesspiegel reports is under consideration, would be the state-direction assessment the ministers have so far withheld.
