Blackouts Reveal How Fragile Society Really Is

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Blackouts Reveal How Fragile Society Really Is Authored by John Walter via John Walter,"Long-term blackout" gets used loosely enough that people end up arguing past each other,…

"Long-term blackout" gets used loosely enough that people end up arguing past each other, and the confusion deepens because a week without power is a bad camping trip for somebody in rural Maine with a generator and a wood stove while being an outright catastrophe for a family on the fourteenth floor of a Miami condo with an insulin-dependent nine-year-old. Both readings are accurate, and neither is the subject here.

For the rest of this piece the definition stays blunt and fixed, meaning three months or more of a bulk transmission system being down across a whole region rather than a single neighborhood or one feeder. Three months is roughly the point at which every buffer has been spent, fuel and batteries and goodwill and savings and patience, the diesel in a hospital's belly tank, the last pallets of bottled water at the back of a supermarket, and it is also long enough for an emergency to harden into a condition, which is what people stop reacting to.

The duration is not theoretical either, because Cuba has been living inside a rolling version of it since late 2024, with daily generation deficits averaging roughly 1,600 megawatts in 2025 on the state utility's own published figures, which on a grid that size means half of national demand going unmet on the worst days. Havana logged a single blackout longer than twenty hours, the whole island went dark again in December 2025 with ten million people affected and no fuel reserves left, and the obvious question is what the rich version of the same failure looks like once the money and the plant inventory are better and the preparation is no better at all.

The reliability filings answer more of that than most people realize, and almost nobody reads them. In January 2026 the North American Electric Reliability Corporation published a 181-page long-term assessment that put 13 of 23 assessment areas at elevated or high resource adequacy risk inside the next five years, while utilities have announced more than 55,000…

Hardw…

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