The Grid Doesn't Need More Power Plants (It Needs This)

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The Grid Doesn't Need More Power Plants (It Needs This)

The National Grid Is Dead

The National Grid Is Dead. Here's What Replaces It.

In April 2025, most of Spain and Portugal went dark. A cascading failure knocked out the Iberian peninsula’s grid in seconds. Just four years earlier, Texas came within 4 minutes and 37 seconds of its own total collapse.

Not a temporary blackout — a full shutdown. What engineers call a “black start,” a recovery process that can take days or even weeks. Not to mention the human cost when systems fail.

According to the Department of Energy, 70 percent of US transmission lines are over 25 years old. We are running 21st-century lives on a mid-20th-century grid.

But back in 1997, energy consultant Karl Rábago wrote a blueprint for a radically different grid. His model? The internet.

Not today’s centralized internet dominated by a few corporations, but the early decentralized and collaborative internet of the 1990s.

So how would an internet-like grid prevent blackouts? And why was this idea ignored for decades?

First, we need to understand what went wrong with the current system.

Resources

Script and citations:
https://undecided.tech/the-national-g...

Solar guide:
https://undecided.link/solar-guide

Podcast: Video version | Audio version

Discord:
https://undecided.link/discord

Patreon:
https://undecided.link/patreon

Energy tools: EnergySage (US) | EnergyPal (Canada)

Chapters