The Trump administration has blamed the Russian government for a campaign of cyber attacks stretching back at least two years that targeted the US power grid.
This marks the first time the United States has publicly accused Moscow of hacking into American energy infrastructure.
Russian government hackers sought to penetrate multiple US critical infrastructure sectors, including energy, nuclear, commercial facilities, water, aviation and manufacturing, beginning in March 2016, or possibly earlier, a US security alert said.
The Department of Homeland Security and FBI said the campaign targeted the networks of small commercial facilities "where they staged malware, conducted spear phishing, and gained remote access into energy sector networks."
The direct condemnation of Moscow represented an escalation in the Trump administration's attempts to deter Russia's aggression in cyberspace, after senior US intelligence officials said in recent weeks the Kremlin believes it can launch hacking operations against the West with impunity.
Russia in the past has denied it has tried to hack into other countries' infrastructure, and vowed on Thursday to retaliate for the new sanctions.
US security officials have long warned that the United States may be vulnerable to debilitating cyber attacks from hostile adversaries. It was not clear what impact the attacks had on the firms that were targeted.
But Thursday's alert provided a link to an analysis by the US cyber security firm Symantec last autumn that said a group it had dubbed Dragonfly had targeted energy companies in the United States and Europe and in some cases broke into the core systems that control the companies' operations.
Malicious email campaigns dating back to late 2015 were used to gain entry into organisations in the United States, Turkey and Switzerland, and likely other countries, Symantec said at the time.
Russia has shown a willingness to leverage access into energy networks for damaging effect in the past.
Kremlin-linked hackers were widely blamed for two attacks on the Ukrainian energy grid in 2015 and 2016, that caused temporary blackouts for hundreds of thousands of customers and were considered first-of-their-kind assaults.
