Undecided with Matt Ferrell: 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 process that could take days to weeks to recover from. Not to mention all of the people that died as a result. According to the Department of Energy, 70 percent of US transmission lines are over 25 years old. We’re 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. Seriously. 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.

Are you team DER [Distributed Energy Resources] or team “leave things as they are”?

The virtual utility is the “Internetification” of electrical supply. It has numerous benefits, and of course will be fought by the current centralized utilities, just like big oil is fighting renewables.