Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Grid?

In 2000, the National Academy of Engineering deemed the modern electricity grid the greatest engineering achievement of the twentieth century—greater than air travel, computers, and health technologies (also included in the top twenty). The marvel of electricity is that it is a fundamentally social infrastructure: everyone connected to the grid relies on a vast planning apparatus to ensure the level of electricity generation (supply) is always exactly equal to the amount of demand and fluctuates within very tight limits. If not, the entire system could fail, requiring a “black start”, which can take months, if not years, to repair. 

Keeping this system in balance is thus an urgent social responsibility. For most of the history of electrification in the United States, that responsibility was largely shouldered by publicly regulated electric utilities. Yet, as we explained in a previous issue, this changed in the 1970s when neoliberal reformers decided utilities were too monopolistic and uncompetitive to address the energy challenges heading toward the new millennium. The result was what some call deregulation, but the key term here is “unbundling.” No longer would a single entity harness central planning and a socialized investment model to run the system holistically. The grid was rather broken up into separate markets with hopes that the forces of competition would improve technology and lower prices for consumers (the record on the former is positive; the latter not so much). 

In 2025, however, the grid appears as fragile as ever, with blackouts increasing, and it’s not entirely clear where the responsibility lies in keeping the whole system in balance. Grid governance is described as “byzantine”, with an overlapping set of mostly private institutions separately charged with aspects of grid reliability, including Regional Transmission Organizations, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, and utilities themselves. 

The most recent catastrophic failure in recent memory was 2021’s Winter Storm Uri in Texas: millions lost electricity for days and 246 people lost their lives. In the fallout, a court actually ruled that independent power producers—largely owners of natural gas-fueled power plants—actually have no responsibility to keep the lights on for customers. The lawyer representing these “merchant generators” explained that this was in fact a policy choice: “because of the unbundling and the separation, you also don’t have the same duties and obligations [to consumers].” Indeed, because of the extreme deregulation of Texas’s electricity grid, it is a legal statute that the generation and retail sides of electricity must be run in isolation from each other in the name of market competition. The generators of electricity need only be responsible to their shareholders.

In lieu of any public commitment to grid reliability, individual households are losing trust in the grid and turning to diesel-powered generators. One of the leading sellers of such generators, Generac, reports annual net sales have risen 285% from $1.4 billion in 2013 to over $4 billion in 2023, with roughly half of these sales going to residential customers. Households increasingly see electricity as their own individual responsibility to prepare for the inevitability of blackouts. 

In an appropriately titled article, “What’s Good For Generac Is Bad For America”, the energy analyst Robert Bryce explains that individualizing responsibility for reliability is not available to everyone: “... [Generac’s] target demographic is buyers whose homes are worth $500,000 and have household incomes of $135,000 or more per year.”

Complicating all of this, of course, is climate change, which may make some of the storms straining grid reliability worse. Conservatives might shrug away the responsibility to transition to clean energy in response, but liberals and the Left also tend to ignore the importance of a reliable electricity system, sometimes as a misguided reaction to the Right’s hostility to curbing carbon emissions. The New York Times even claimed efforts to “address the reliability and resilience of the electricity grid” were “top concerns for climate change deniers.” And the New School’s Genevieve Guenther, author of The Language of Climate Politics, ranks “resilience” as one of six words that animate climate denial. (Another is “growth.”)

For the affluent consumer who’s concerned with climate change but not with grid reliability, one consumer product promises an enticing solution: the individual responsibility of a Generac generator but without the carbon emissions of its fossil fuel combustion. Or at least that's the promise on which they’re sold.