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.¹ Not a temporary blackout. A full shutdown. What engineers call a “black start,” a process that could take days to weeks to recover from.² Not to mention all of the people that died as a result.³

The infrastructure that failed them? According to the Department of Energy, 70 percent of US transmission lines are over 25 years old.⁴ We’re running 21st century lives on a mid-20th century grid.

But here’s the thing. One guy actually saw this coming. Back in 1997, energy consultant Karl Rábago wrote a blueprint for a radically different grid. His model? The internet. Seriously. The internet. And no, I’m not talking about today’s internet, which is just five billionaires in a trench coat. I’m talking about the ’90s internet. Decentralized. Collaborative. And really, really cool.

So how would the internet stop a blackout? And why did the guy who figured it out get ignored for 30 years? But first, we need to understand what went so wrong.

A House of Cards

The United States energy grid is many things. A lifeline. A miracle. A house of cards. But one thing it isn’t … is current. Well, let me rephrase that. It doesn’t reflect our modern world yet.

The DOE puts it bluntly: “Our electric infrastructure is aging and it is being pushed to do more than it was originally designed to do.”⁵ The US grid is split into just three regions: East, West, and … Texas. More than 60 balancing authorities coordinate energy flowing through 180 million power poles, five and a half million miles of transmission lines, and thousands of power plants.⁶⁷⁸ Their job? Make sure supply matches demand. Every second. Every day. If that balance breaks for even a moment … components get damaged, infrastructure weakens, or worse, the lights go out.⁹⁶

And when a blackout looms, our backup plan is basically … turn things off and hope for the best. One of our last-ditch protocols, called under frequency load shedding, is just automatically flipping circuit breakers until the grid stabilizes. We’ve been doing it since the 1960s.¹⁰⁹

When that doesn’t work, utilities roll out rotating blackouts, cutting power to alternating groups of customers.⁶¹¹ When that doesn’t work? Total reset.

That’s what nearly happened in Texas. When temperatures dropped in February 2021, electricity demand surged while generators went offline one by one. ERCOT, the Texas grid, scrambled to rebalance, but it took days of blackouts to stabilize the grid.⁶³ They were 4 minutes and 37 seconds from needing that total restart.¹

Black out or black start … when the grid fails, things get dark. And the strangest part? Someone wrote the fix for this in 1997. Not a research paper. A full blueprint. It’s been sitting there for almost 30 years. So why hasn’t anyone built it?

But It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

Here’s where I’ll get personal for a second. I have over 40 solar panels on my roof. I have 20 kilowatt hours of energy storage in my garage. My geothermal heat pump handles heating, cooling, and hot water so efficiently that my HVAC barely registers on my electric bill. When my grid goes down … honestly, I sleep pretty well at night.

That’s not a brag. That’s the point. The binary of “we have power or we don’t” only exists when you’re completely dependent on a monolithic grid with monolithic power generation. And today, we have cost-effective ways to break that dependency. Rooftop solar. Community solar farms. Batteries. EVs that can power your house. These tools give you power … in every sense of the word.

You can become what the industry calls a “prosumer.” Part consumer, part producer. You sell excess power back to the grid. You chip in during times of strain. And most importantly, when things go sideways, you’re not helpless.¹² This applies to residential and commercial buildings.

So what would the world look like if everyone had that kind of choice? What if we could pick our energy the way we pick our internet provider? It turns out there’s a name for this. And the guy who coined it accidentally proved it works … thanks to his own mother. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Internetification

Part of the beauty of the Internet is that there is no singular plug to pull that collapses a network of networks. Just because one ISP is doing maintenance in New York doesn’t mean everyone on the East Coast is locked out of their phones. Just because one website is down doesn’t mean every other website is unavailable.¹³¹⁴

The helplessness of an internet outage only gets serious when what you need is controlled by a single entity … which is kind of exactly my point. We saw this play out in back-to-back incidents in the fall of 2025, when centralized internet service failures left millions stranded.¹⁵¹⁶

Now, chances are you’ve heard of the “crapification” that’s been plaguing online services.¹⁷ Let me introduce you to something that doesn’t stink: internetification. It’s a proposal to take the internet’s most powerful feature, its decentralization, and apply it to energy.¹³

At its most basic, this is about microgrids. Small, self-contained power networks that can connect to the main grid … but also disconnect and run on their own. Think of it like your home Wi-Fi. Your devices all talk to each other inside your house. They can reach the wider internet when they want to, but if your ISP goes down, your local network keeps humming along.

What makes a microgrid “micro”? It comes down to DERs, or distributed energy resources. These are the solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries that change the direction energy moves. Up until the last few decades, delivering energy was a one-sided affair. A utility generated or bought electricity, sent it to you, and that was that. You get what you get. No choice in where, when, or how.¹³¹²

DERs flip that script. They’re what turn you from a passive consumer into a prosumer, or someone who both uses and produces energy. But beyond individual empowerment, DERs are what make microgrids resilient. When more people, communities, and companies produce and store their own power, there’s less pressure on the grid overall. Fewer demand spikes, fewer emergencies. And when the main grid does go down, a microgrid can disconnect and keep running on its own, which is what engineers call “islanding.” That’s why hospitals, grocery stores, and data centers already rely on them.¹⁸

In hospitals, for example, backup generators usually aren’t enough to keep life support equipment like ventilators or dialysis machines running for more than a few hours. Microgrids in healthcare facilities therefore work as a safety net that protects patients.¹⁹

Right now, the energy grid is already a lot like the internet in terms of markets. Some people are lucky enough to live in areas where they can freely pick their service provider … and some aren’t.²⁰ Having multiple ISPs competing in the same area is good. It drives innovation and it doesn’t threaten the overall health of the net. Microgrids extend that same freedom of choice to energy. And we’ve known this works for quite a while.

The concept goes back 30 years, and it starts with a guy who calls himself a “regulatory hit man.”

The 30-Year Blueprint

Karl Rábago has been on every side of the energy debate. Texas public utility commissioner. Department of Energy official. Vice president of Austin Energy. He’s spent three decades inside the system … and three decades arguing that the system needs to change.²¹

In 1997, he wrote a book chapter in “The Virtual Utility.” In it, he basically described the grid we need today:

“One message of the new information media is that truly revolutionary growth in the ubiquity and use of information came only with decentralization and nearly unfettered interconnection. If this message has an analogue in the electric utility industry, it is the distributed utility model … Rather than the brute-force solution of adding a new power plant or expensive transmission upgrade, the careful targeting of modular and flexible efficiency or renewable options offers least-cost options to enhance service quality and reliability.”¹⁴

That was 1997. The same year most of us were still on dial-up.

I sat down with Karl and asked him: after 30 years, has anything changed your mind? His answer was blunt.

“The inescapable conclusion is that the distributed architecture for so many things is the most elegant and efficient … from nature, you know, to communities, to the electric grid.”

But Karl didn’t just write papers about this. He tested it. And some of his best stories sound less like energy policy and more like … a sitcom.

At Austin Energy, Karl ran a thermostat control program covering 95,000 homes. One day he stopped by his mom’s house for lunch. She was cranking the air conditioning before a scheduled demand response event. She’d gotten the notice and decided to pre-cool the house before Karl, her own son, “turned off her electricity.”

Here’s the punchline. She accidentally proved the entire concept. When customers got advance notice, they pre-cooled their homes on their own. The grid got the same demand reduction. Customers stayed comfortable. The utility sold just as much electricity. Everyone won.

And Karl’s team took it further. Instead of picking a vendor and deploying one proprietary thermostat, they did something radical. They said: bring your own thermostat. You pick the device, but just make sure it connects to our API. We’ll keep a secure system behind the firewall and you’ll see pricing in real time. And most important, if you reduce your consumption, we’ll pay you. I’ve participated in a similar program in Massachusetts. It’s great.

Sound familiar? Open standards. Customer choice. Security at the boundary. Innovation at the edge. That’s the internet model, but applied to energy in Austin over a decade ago.

You can check out my full in-depth interview with Karl on my second channel, where we go into everything from net metering to what it means to be an efficiency advocate. But the takeaway I want to focus on here is where this idea goes next.

Karl had the theory. He proved the concept in Austin, but he was missing one piece. The actual structure, or device, that could make it all work. It took another 28 years … and a guy nicknamed ‘Broadband Jesus’ … to propose the solution.

Broadband Jesus Goes Electric

Just a year after Karl published “The Virtual Utility,” a Swedish tech entrepreneur named Jonas Birgersson built something that would change the world. In 1998, he created a router-based broadband network that freed Sweden from dial-up. It earned him the nickname “Broadband Jesus.”¹³²² Thanks to him, today’s kids will never know the screech of a modem handshake.

Decades later, Birgersson aimed at a bigger target. In September 2025, he and a Swedish-American research team published “EnergyNet Explained: Internetification of Energy Distribution.”²³

The pitch? Take the exact model that decentralized the internet and build an energy version. Open source, not proprietary. “Energy Routers” instead of internet routers. EnergyNet instead of Internet. I think you get the idea.²³ The key to the whole thing is one technical trick. It sounds complicated, but it’s actually elegant.

The key innovation is something called “galvanic separation,” which is also really fun to say. It draws a hard boundary between your local energy and the larger grid. The paper puts it this way:

“Power flows across this boundary when, and only when, both sides explicitly agree, using a predefined digital negotiation process managed by software. This makes it possible to support the grid, while it will never be disturbed.”²³

Birgersson said it more simply in a January interview:

“If you have photovoltaics, that’s on one port, and if there’s a fault, it can’t get past that port. If you have storage, it can’t get past that port … because we can never create a cascade, suddenly we can have an unlimited amount of electro tech invested locally without any technical negative effect on the traditional grid.”¹³

When I asked Karl about energy routers, he didn’t just endorse the idea. He said he’s one device away from living it.

“I have a Ford Lightning. I have a couple of solar panels on the new garage. I have intelligent and controllable devices. And the only thing I’m missing right now is the router, which could orchestrate all those pieces for me. The router is the invention of this decade.”

Then he took it one step further. Imagine your router talks to your neighbor’s router. Sarah next door is throwing a party. You’re away for the weekend. Your excess solar flows to her house. The transaction happens automatically. No utility middleman. Just two routers negotiating on your behalf.

That’s not science fiction. That’s the architecture Birgersson published and Karl has been imagining for 30 years.

But Here’s the Problem

If this all sounds too good … it kind of is. At least for right now.

Utilities aren’t rushing to hand over the keys. Their entire business model is built on centralized generation and delivery. As Karl told me, they’ll fight this “like they fight dealership requirements for Tesla.” Anything to protect the incumbent.

And even for early adopters, the transition is messy. Karl described it as a “confusing array of options.” Time-of-use rates, demand response programs, solar incentives, smart panels, EV charging schedules … and that’s just one house. He’s a self-described energy nerd, and even he has trouble keeping track. Heck, I’m trying to live this dream too and I find it confusing.

There’s also the access problem. Not everyone can afford solar panels, batteries, or an EV. The prosumer revolution means nothing if it only reaches people with money. For microgrids to work like the internet, they need to be as accessible as the internet. We’re not there yet.

So is this actually going to happen? Or is internetification going to join the long list of great ideas that utilities buried? I’ll tell you what I think. But first, there’s one stat that changed my mind and keeps me optimistic.

Every time someone claims a certain level of solar penetration will break the grid, the threshold keeps climbing. It used to be 5%. Then the national labs said they couldn’t find real problems below 15%. Now Holy Cross Energy, a rural co-op in Colorado, runs on 85% renewable resources. As Karl put it: “Apparently they’re not all living in caves and burning tar-soaked sticks for light at night.”

Here’s My Take

The technology for a smarter, more distributed grid exists right now. Energy routers, smart panels, solar, batteries, EVs … all real. All available. Karl Rábago wrote the blueprint in 1997. Jonas Birgersson published the architecture in 2025. We’re 28 years into this idea and just now catching up.

I think we’ll get there. Not because utilities will have a sudden change of heart, but because the economics will make resistance pointless. When Karl was at Austin Energy, engineers from the generation side used to sneak over to his team and whisper, “Can I get assigned to your project? I think this is the future.” They weren’t thinking about leaving the utility. They were thinking about what being a utility worker in the future would look like.

And that’s the thing people miss about this. Internetification isn’t about destroying utilities. It’s about evolving them. We’ll always need someone to maintain the toll road, enforce the speed limits, and collect the fares. But the road itself? It can look a lot different.

As Rábago wrote all the way back in 1997:

“The power of the technological innovation does not lie in doing business-as-usual in a different, even more efficient way. The heartbeat message of the future is fundamental change.”¹⁴