Too Centralized to Survive: The Hidden Risk in Europe’s Power Grid

On April 28, 2025, large parts of Spain, Portugal, and southern France were unexpectedly plunged into darkness. A sudden and widespread blackout disrupted airports, hospitals, public transport, and communications across the region. It was a sharp reminder of how fragile the structures we rely on can be — and an urgent call to rethink how Europe approaches its energy future. And no, the reason for the blackout is not the issue.

For decades, Europe has rightfully celebrated its vision of interconnected energy. The creation of a unified grid across borders has been framed as a symbol of cooperation and technical achievement. In many ways, it has delivered significant benefits: balancing supply and demand across countries (for example, helping Germany when Russia stopped supplying gas), and fostering a common European energy market. But as this week's blackout demonstrated so clearly, interconnection alone is not resilience. Centralization, even when sophisticated, comes with risks that must no longer be ignored.

The problem is not the idea of collaboration. It is the assumption that building ever larger, ever more tightly bound systems is inherently safer. In reality, larger systems often mean larger points of failure. A fault in one area can cascade across entire regions, turning a local disruption into a continental crisis. This is precisely what happened. And it highlights the urgent need for a complementary philosophy to Europe’s energy model: one that's built on distribution, autonomy, and local resilience.

Distributed energy systems, using current technologies, like solar and wind (with ample storage, of course) or future technologies, like small modular fission reactors (SMRs), and compact fusion systems, offer exactly this kind of resilience. They bring power production closer to the people and industries that rely on it. In the April 28 blackout, airports and subway systems ground to a halt, trains were stranded on open tracks, traffic lights failed, and hospitals were forced onto emergency generators. If these critical services had been supported by distributed or standalone energy sources, many of these failures could have been avoided. Regions, cities, and neighborhoods could have maintained essential functions independently. Distributed energy transforms electricity from a distant, centralized service into a resilient, local, and controllable asset, exactly what Europe's future demands.

Europe already possesses the technology, the economic strength, and the political frameworks to build such a system. What has been missing is prioritization. Local resilience has often been treated as a secondary concern, a “each-household-for-itself” kind of idea. Yet if we are serious about building a sustainable, secure energy future, distributed energy must become a central pillar, not a peripheral one.

This is not an argument against continental collaboration. It is an argument for smarter, layered systems. Europe must still pursue integrated markets, shared renewable investments, and cross-border cooperation. But resilience must be embedded within that framework. Large, centralized plants must be complemented by strong local generation. National grids must be capable of fragmenting safely when needed, allowing communities and municipal services to "island" themselves rather than suffer cascading failures.

Distributed energy sources are uniquely suited to meet this challenge. They not only increase resilience, they also accelerate the energy transition by embedding clean power sources directly into the places where they are most needed. They empower individuals, businesses, and communities to participate actively in their own energy security, rather than depending entirely on distant infrastructure.

The blackout of April 28 should not be seen only as a technical fault to be corrected. It should be treated as a strategic warning: a reminder that scale without redundancy, interconnection without independence, and complexity without local control all carry hidden risks. It is time for Europe to evolve beyond the idea that energy security is purely a matter of how much power can be moved across borders. Real security comes from diversity, flexibility, and proximity.

Europe has been a global leader in climate ambition and technological innovation. Now it must also lead in investing and building the next generation of energy systems: distributed, resilient, and people-centered. This means rethinking incentives to support local generation. It means modernizing power generation regulations to facilitate other sources. It means investing in future energy technologies that would supply the demand and security Europe needs.

The blackout was a disruption. But it can also be an opportunity. An opportunity to balance Europe’s justifiable pride in unity with the practical wisdom of local resilience.

Energy is the foundation of modern life. Its security cannot rest on a single system, no matter how sophisticated. It must be woven into every layer of society, from the national grid down to the last home and streetlight. The time for change is now, before the next outage reminds us again of what we already know.