Electrify Everything—and Have A Backup

When the lights went out across large swaths of the Iberian Peninsula this week, the effects were swift and strange. Guests at high-end hotels couldn’t get into their rooms—not because the staff had vanished, but because the keycards didn’t work. In hostels, where old-fashioned brass keys still hang behind the front desk, the night went on more or less as usual. Toilets in some places refused to flush, kitchens in others went cold. No warm food, no coffee. A true European tragedy. Yet those with gas stovetops were still able to serve up hot meals.

“We had no internet for most of the day. Power came back at around 9 pm in Madrid. Everyone was out on the streets, listening to battery-powered radios!” said Kelly Delaney, an energy expert vacationing in Spain at the time. “Hotels couldn’t check us in with no computers and no way to set up electronic key cards, and we had to scramble and find a hostel that used traditional keys. I have never thought about keys. Maybe some things should not be linked to electricity.”

As the blackout dragged on for hours, Spaniards did what Spaniards do: they took to the streets. There was music, there were impromptu fiestas. In a country with a long tradition of resilience, the spirit stayed high even as the grid stayed down.

But this event offers a glimpse into a larger truth: running the grid of the future—especially one powered increasingly by renewable energy—is not going to be seamless. There will be hiccups. And when everything is electrified, those hiccups hit harder.

History reminds us that even the brightest minds can trip the switch. In 1965, Thomas Edison’s former company, by then Consolidated Edison, was at the center of a cascading failure that plunged 30 million people in the northeastern U.S. into darkness. The blackout wasn’t caused by malicious actors or massive storms—but by a faulty relay. Even high-tech systems are only as resilient as their weakest link.

Look to South Africa for a more persistent warning. The country’s grid struggles are not due to a lack of renewables or fossil fuels per se, but mismanagement. South Africans endured an average of 3.71 hours of load-shedding per day in 2023. When things fall apart, it’s not always the energy mix that’s to blame—it’s how you run the system.

Electrifying everything is still one of the fastest and cheapest ways to cut emissions, especially when the power comes from clean sources. According to the International Energy Agency, electrification of transport and heating could reduce global CO₂ emissions by nearly 4 gigatons per year by 2050. That’s the equivalent of eliminating the emissions of the entire European Union. Still, some sectors—heavy industry, aviation—remain stubbornly hard to electrify.

There is no silver bullet and running the grid on volatile renewables will have its challenges. In addition to improving how we manage the grid, which was focus of most analyses to date, there are also shades of gray in deciding what should be electrified. While hospitals and military bases usually have backup power, many everyday tools that once worked manually now rely entirely on electricity. For example, Tesla, for all its high-tech wizardry, still includes a manual door release in its cars. In a pinch, you can always get out. Contrast that with the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in 2021. The pipeline couldn’t operate because the control systems were offline—systems that, not so long ago, could be run manually.

This isn’t just a technical issue—it’s an economic one. Maintaining manual options costs money. Do hotels need a physical master key for every door? Should we keep horses in the barn just in case there is another oil embargo?

If your system works 100% of the time, redundancy seems wasteful. But in a world of cyber threats, blackouts, and system overloads, we’re beginning to see that resilience matters.

The silver lining? We’re having this conversation now. We’re learning from Iberia, from South Africa, and from many other electric grids around the world. Electrify everything—but leave a hatch open, just in case. In energy, as in life, it’s always wise to have a backup plan.