What if America Went Completely Dark?

This NY Times Magazine referring to the bespoke nature of transformers said, “Somehow, we’ve made the industrial equivalent of a Fabergé egg the linchpin of our civilization.” Think how that came to be. Would an industry that is immune from competitive pressure search for ways to standardize transformers? Would an industry that profits from spending more on equipment try to reduce the cost of transformers? Would builders of transformers try to build standardized and cheaper transformers when that’s not what their customers want?

We’ve done this to ourselves starting a century ago when we decided that electricity should be controlled by monopoly utilities. CRE is a way to let the market discover what we’ve been missing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/magazine/national-blackout-power-electricity-outage.html