Overview

The machine beneath the machines. On the afternoon of 28 April 2025, the lights went out across Spain and Portugal. Fifty-five million people lost power within ninety seconds. Hospitals fell back on generators. Trains stopped on open track. Mobile networks collapsed. Across Europe, grid operators watched a system they thought they understood behave in ways that none of their models had predicted. The blackout was an early warning. The most reliable industrial machine of the twentieth century is being asked to do things it was not designed to do, in conditions it was not designed to operate in, at a pace that exceeds the pace at which the machine itself can be rebuilt. The Grid is the hidden story of the infrastructure beneath every other infrastructure: the continent-sized electrical system that the modern world depends on more completely, and more invisibly, than on anything else. It is a book about physics and politics in equal measure. About why a wire under your street has more to do with the energy transition than any wire across the country. About the Baltic states' disconnection from the Russian synchronous grid in February 2025, the Chinese ultra-high-voltage transmission lines no Western jurisdiction can match, the hyperscaler data centres now buying nuclear reactors, and the transformer factories that have become the binding constraint on the energy transition. Written in the style of Tim Marshall and Ed Conway, The Grid makes the most important industrial system on Earth visible, understandable, and gripping. For anyone who has ever wondered how the lights stay on, this is the book that explains why that question has suddenly become the most political question of the decade. Part of the Infrastructure: The Hidden World series, alongside The Cables That Bind the World, The Buildings That Store the World, and The Standards That Run the World.

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