Just to highlight this: the last significant power outage in Western/middle Europe was 2003. [1]

That's 20 years without any significant problems in the grid, apart from small localized outages.

It's not hard to start taking things for granted if it works perfectly for 20 years.

Many people don't even have cash anymore, either in their wallet or at home. In case of a longer power outage a significant part of the population might not even be able to buy food for days.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Italy_blackout

Yeah, this is the turkey’s dilemma - life on a farm is a lot better than life in the wild for 51 out of the 52 weeks of the year.

Most of our modern economy and systems are built to reduce redundancy and buffers - ever since the era of “just in time” manufacturing, we’ve done our best to strip out any “fat” from our systems to reduce costs. Consequently, any time we face anything but the most idealized conditions, the whole system collapses.

The problem is that, culturally, we’re extremely short-termist- normally I’d take this occasion to dunk on MBAs, and they deserve it, but broadly as a people we’re bad at recognizing just how far down the road you need to kick a can so you’re not the one who has to deal with it next time and we’ve gotten pretty lazy about actually doing the work required to build something durable.

Honest question, are we better off in the long run, and is it a better solution, to decentralize energy generation and make more smaller grids rather than linking them all up? This isn't to say completely getting rid of the ability to transfer between the smaller grids to assist with power disruptions but to decouple and make it less likely for catastrophic "global" failures like this.

We're slowly reaching this point with the internet too.

I feel like to many technologists, the internet is still "the place you go to to play games and chat with friends", just like it was 20 years ago. Even if our brains know it isn't true, our hearts still feel that way.

I sometimes feel like the countries cutting off internet access during high school final exams have a point. If you know the internet will be off and on a few days a year, your systems will be designed accordingly, and if anything breaks, you'll notice quickly and during a low-stakes situation.

Burying lines is not a panacea, it generates massive reactance changes compared to a classic line.

Maybe a good reason (in parts of the world where this is practical) to have some solar + battery storage. Doesn't even need to fully replace grid power, just enough to run the barebones when the grid goes out.