KITE & KEY MEDIA: Flipping a light switch is one of those things you only notice when it doesn’t work – and Americans have had the luxury of not noticing for about a century. That streak is why it’s worth paying attention when the normally sedate bureaucrats who oversee the power grid start telling Congress that the red lights are flashing. Here’s what they’re actually worried about.

Five seconds. That’s about how long you’ve been watching this video. And in 2025 it was also the amount of time it took for 60% of the electricity supply in Spain to vanish from the country’s grid, which led to 10 hours of darkness in parts of four countries. It’s a nightmarish scenario and there’s a good chance that it’s coming to America soon. Electricity. It’s the backbone of our entire world. Your house. Your town. Your excessive enthusiasm for Christmas. We build our lives around the assumption that when we flip a switch it’ll be there for whatever we need. Whether it’s controlling the climate in our homes, refrigerating our food, or just making sure the neighbors can see you’ve portrayed Santa committing a Class B felony. And when you consider the history, you can see just how quickly we’ve gotten used to this. When Thomas Edison opened America’s first commercial power plant in 1882, it served 59 customers in lower Manhattan. By the time another 40 years or so had passed, America’s electricity consumption looked like this. By 1929 the U.S. was generating more power than the rest of the world combined. And in the century since, our appetite has only grown. In 2025, the government’s Energy Information Administration reported that the country consumed 14 times more electricity than it had in 1950. All of which sounds like a standard story of progress. As the decades pass and technology evolves, things that once seemed miraculous become so commonplace that we can take them for granted. But here’s the thing, we should definitely not be taking them for granted. Because the days of assuming we know what’s gonna happen when we flip the switch may be coming to an end. In 2023, members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the government body that regulates electricity transmission, appeared before a Senate committee with a series of dire warnings. One of them testified that we face unprecedented challenges to the reliability of our nation’s electric system. Another said that the United States is heading for a very catastrophic situation in terms of reliability. And then he added, this problem is coming, it’s coming quickly, the red lights are flashing. And while we don’t like to editorialize here at Chitin Key, that sounds bad. The data shows that these concerns aren’t exaggerated. In 2026, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the body charged with making sure that the power grid is dependable, warned that nearly half of America’s population was going to be at high risk of rolling blackouts in the next few years. In fact, by the end of the decade, every single region of the US and Canada is projected to be at at least elevated risk, with the single exception of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, which makes sense because Saskatchewan literally has more cows than people. So if there’s a blackout there, well, you know what happened. But all of this leads to an obvious question. How does this happen? It’s been almost a hundred and fifty years since Thomas Edison got the ball rolling, and somehow we’re getting worse at this? What’s going on here? To unravel this mystery, go back to those officials testifying before Congress. One of them summed up the problem in four words. The math doesn’t work. Here’s what he meant by that. In many cases, we’re actually losing power, as in we’ll have less of it in a few years than we do now. Take, for example, the PJM interconnection, the country’s largest power grid operator which serves 65 million customers in 13 states. In 2023, PJM issued a report estimating that it might lose about 40 gigawatts of electricity, more than 20% of its entire capacity, by the year 2030, thanks to power plant retirements. Which isn’t the end of the world, right? You just bring on new power sources, which is what they’re doing. Here’s the problem. The high-end estimate of those new sources is a little over 30 gigawatts. In other words, they’re replacing 40 with 30. Also known as, the math doesn’t work. And similar situations are happening all over the country. Why? Well, to understand that, we have to understand how the economics of electricity works. And you might be thinking, but kite and key, that sounds excruciatingly boring. And it is, dear viewer. Or at least it would be if you hadn’t chosen the one channel that understands it so boring that you have to explain it with the assistance of adorable puppies dressed as economists. Here’s the way this all goes down. In any given part of the country, you might have lots of potential sources of electricity. Natural gas, solar, coal, wind, nuclear. And at any given moment, all those sources are selling power at different prices. Now, the decision as to which one to use is not made by you, the customer. It’s made by the people responsible for coordinating the system, who take bids from electricity producers, sometimes as often as every five minutes, and buy whatever options are cheapest at the time until they’ve got enough power to meet demand. None of which seems crazy. Adequate energy at low prices is pretty much what everyone wants. But here’s where this gets complicated. In some cases, cheap electricity comes with unintended consequences. Here’s what we mean. Not all energy sources are created equal. Some of them, like nuclear and most coal plants, are what’s referred to as baseload power. They can essentially run all the time. Others, like natural gas plants, are dispatchable, meaning you can quickly turn them on or off depending on demand. Then there are sources like wind and solar, which are intermittent. In other words, you only get power from them when the weather is cooperating. And this is where the problem creeps in. In 2024, the government reported that wind, on average, only produces energy about one third of the time. For solar, it was less than one quarter of the time. By contrast, natural gas was around 60% and nuclear was at 90%. But when wind and solar are working, they can be incredibly cheap. In fact, because they’re heavily subsidized by the government, their prices can actually go negative. They can pay the grid to take their power and still stay in business. Needless to say, all the other electricity producers can’t do that, which makes them less profitable, which leads an increasing number of them to close, which leads to a world where we’re increasingly dependent on electricity sources that literally don’t produce any energy most of the time. Those 40 gigawatts PJM may lose? Almost all coal or natural gas. The up to 30 gigawatts that will partially replace it? Mostly wind and solar, which is the kind of thing that leads otherwise boring bureaucrats from places like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to yell, the red lights are flashing at members of Congress. Because by privileging the energy sources that work the best some of the time, we’re gutting the energy sources that work the best all of the time, the ones that actually determine whether we’ll have power. There’s no doubt that wind and solar are going to be important parts of America’s energy future. But imagining that they can carry the burden of the entire system today is risking disaster. When wind and solar can’t produce, we rely on sources like nuclear, natural gas, and even coal to keep the lights on. But if we cut out that part of the equation, if we don’t build to ensure resiliency, we’re placing our standard of living on a knife’s edge. And if we get that balance even slightly wrong, well…

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