The Deceptive Calm of a Local Blackout
So, a few thousand people in Utah sat in the dark for a while. Twenty thousand here, another three thousand there. The official story, a neatly packaged and sterile explanation spoon-fed to the local news, is “damage to a power line.” Rocky Mountain Power is “aware” of the problem. Case closed, right? This is the kind of mundane, forgettable event that fills the B-block of a local news broadcast, a momentary inconvenience quickly supplanted by sports scores and weather forecasts. But to dismiss this as a mere local hiccup is to willfully ignore the flashing red light on the dashboard of a nation driving at a hundred miles an hour towards a cliff. This isn’t a story about Utah. It’s a story about the fundamental, terrifying fragility of the entire Western world’s operating system.
We are told it was just a damaged line. A simple, physical problem. But what does that even mean? Was it a car crash? A branch falling in just the right way? Or was it something more indicative of the systemic rot we refuse to confront? Our electrical grid, the circulatory system of modern civilization, is an antique. It’s a sprawling, creaking relic of the mid-20th century, a patchwork of aging transformers, sagging wires, and outdated control systems desperately trying to manage the demands of the 21st. We have draped a digital, high-tech society over an analog, industrial-age skeleton, and we are shocked when the bones begin to break. It’s insanity. This minor outage in the placid suburbs of Utah County is a stress test, a tiny tremor before the earthquake. And we are failing it.
The Illusion of Resilience
Think about the immediate, visceral reality for those 23,000 people. One moment, they exist in the modern world. The next, they are thrown back into a pre-industrial state. The Wi-Fi dies. The lights go out. The refrigerator stops humming. Communication, commerce, security, entertainment—all of it, gone in an instant. It’s a profound psychological shock, a reminder of the paper-thin veneer of normalcy we depend on. We have outsourced our very survival to this fragile network of wires, a network we neither understand nor properly maintain. Is this strategic? Is it intelligent to build a civilization so utterly dependent on a system so demonstrably vulnerable? Of course not. It is the height of hubris, a gamble on the perpetual stability of a system that was never designed for the load it currently bears, let alone the load we are about to place upon it with the forced march towards mass electrification.
The powers that be, the utility companies and their government regulators, have a vested interest in framing these events as isolated incidents. They are masters of a placating narrative. They assure us they are “working on it,” that crews have been “dispatched.” These are the soothing words meant to lull us back into a state of dependent complacency. But they are managing a crisis of their own making, a crisis born from decades of deferred maintenance, of prioritizing shareholder dividends over capital investment, of treating critical infrastructure like a predictable utility rather than the single most important piece of national security hardware we possess. Every time the lights flicker, it is a testament to their failure. Not just a technical failure. A failure of imagination and a failure of will.
A History Etched in Darkness
We are fools if we think this is a new problem. History provides a chilling blueprint for what is to come, but we are terrible students. Look back. The Northeast Blackout of 2003 plunged 55 million people into darkness across two countries, a cascading failure initiated by a single overgrown tree branch in Ohio. A tree branch. That single point of failure revealed the terrifying interconnectedness and inherent brittleness of the grid. We were promised reforms, new standards, and massive investment. We were told it would never happen again. Was that promise kept? Or was it just public relations? The Texas freeze of 2021 provides a brutal answer. Millions were left without power in freezing temperatures, not because of a foreign attack, but because of a predictable weather event hitting a system that was never weatherized, never upgraded, all in the name of cutting costs. People died. They froze to death in their own homes, in one of the richest energy-producing regions on the planet. This is not a sign of a robust system. It is the hallmark of a failed state.
These are not anomalies. They are data points on a terrifyingly consistent graph. Each event, whether it’s in New York, Texas, or a quiet town in Utah, is a symptom of the same disease: a profound and strategic neglect of the very foundation of our society. We treat the grid like air—we only notice it when it’s gone. But unlike air, it requires constant, vigilant, and expensive upkeep. The investment required to modernize the American grid is measured in the trillions. Trillions. It’s an unsexy, politically unrewarding task. There are no ribbon-cutting ceremonies for replacing a 70-year-old transformer. So, we don’t do it. We kick the can down the road, apply another patch, and pray the whole thing doesn’t collapse on our watch. Is this not the very definition of short-sighted, tactical thinking in the face of a long-term strategic threat?
The Enemy Within and Without
The greatest threat to the grid may not be a winter storm or a falling tree. It’s us. It’s our own complacency. But our adversaries are not so complacent. Do we honestly believe that nations like China and Russia, countries that think in terms of decades and centuries, have not noticed this glaring vulnerability? The U.S. electrical grid is arguably the most valuable, high-impact target in the world. A coordinated physical attack on a handful of key substations—an act that requires little more than publicly available information and a few high-powered rifles—could plunge an entire region into darkness for weeks, if not months. This isn’t a Hollywood script; the Metcalf sniper attack on a California substation in 2013 proved the concept. It was a dress rehearsal. We learned nothing. Meanwhile, the cyber threat is even more acute. Every component of the modern grid is connected, digitized, and, therefore, hackable. Much of the hardware, the critical transformers and circuit breakers, is manufactured abroad, primarily in China. Does anyone seriously think these components arrive without backdoors? Without built-in kill switches? To believe so is to be dangerously, perhaps fatally, naive.
We are willingly hooking our entire national destiny to a system that is physically decrepit, digitally vulnerable, and dependent on foreign supply chains controlled by our primary geopolitical rival. If you were to design a national security nightmare from scratch, you could not do a better job. And into this teetering structure, we are now planning to inject an unprecedented amount of demand. Electric vehicles. Electric heating. The full-scale electrification of the economy. It is a strategic blunder of historic proportions—like trying to run a supercomputer on a pair of AA batteries. The grid cannot handle it. Not now, not in five years. The math simply does not work. We are building a glistening, electrified future on a foundation of sand, and the tide is coming in.
The Unspoken Consequence: Systemic Collapse
Let’s play this out. Let’s move beyond the inconvenience of a 12-hour outage in Utah and consider the strategic implications of a sustained, multi-state blackout. What happens on day three? The first thing to go is information. The internet collapses. Cell towers, with their limited battery backups, go silent. The flow of news, of instructions from authorities, of contact with loved ones, ceases. Fear and rumor fill the void. This is the first stage of societal breakdown. Next comes commerce. Without power, there are no credit card transactions, no bank transfers, no ATMs. The digital economy evaporates. The supply chain, which runs on just-in-time logistics managed by electricity-dependent systems, grinds to a halt. Grocery store shelves, empty within 72 hours, are not restocked. Pharmacies cannot dispense medicine. Gas stations cannot pump fuel. Civilization is a thin veneer, and it is held in place by the steady hum of alternating current.
Then the secondary and tertiary effects begin to cascade. Water treatment plants fail. Without electricity to pump water and manage sanitation, we are thrown back to a 19th-century reality of cholera and dysentery. Hospitals, running on finite generator fuel, become death traps. The intricate systems that manage modern life simply unravel. How long before civil unrest begins? How long before the desperation of a population without food, water, or information boils over into violence? The state’s ability to project force and maintain order is also dependent on that same fragile grid. Their communications, their logistics, their surveillance—all of it is predicated on stable power. A widespread, prolonged blackout is not an inconvenience; it is a decapitation strike against the very concept of a functioning nation-state.
A Choice in the Dark
This is the chessboard. The minor outage in Utah is nothing more than a pawn being pushed forward, a move that seems insignificant but sets the stage for the entire game. We are facing a choice that is as stark as it is unspoken. We can continue down this path of willful ignorance, of applying digital patches to an analog wound, of pretending that our creaking infrastructure can support our limitless ambitions. We can continue to prioritize short-term profits and political expediency over the long-term, existential necessity of a secure and resilient foundation. Or we can choose to see this small event for what it is: a final, desperate warning. A call to begin the hard, generational work of rebuilding the very system that makes our world possible. It will be brutally expensive. It will be politically difficult. But the alternative is to sit in the dark, waiting for the entire fragile structure to come crashing down around us. The lights went out in Utah for a few hours. A minor event. But it was also a glimpse into the future, a future that we are actively, and foolishly, choosing for ourselves every single day we fail to act.
