After International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol labeled the ongoing global energy turmoil the “biggest energy security threat in history” in April, events over the summer vindicated his warning.
The United States authorized the grid operator Southwest Power Pool, Inc. to use backup generation resources in 17 states it serves amid growing demand and extreme heat in late July, while droughts forced European nuclear plants to reduce or halt operations in August.
EU gas stocks reached a record low during the last week of August, and Bangladesh further tightened restrictions on business operating hours as its gas shortage worsened.
Weather extremes continue to disrupt energy production and supply routes, alongside wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Additionally, rising global electricity demand resulting from economic development, growth of electric vehicles, and the AI boom is adding pressure on systems meant for a more energy-stable era.
After decades of expanding supply and security, the 2020s have brought a more strained energy system amid a fragmented global political order, affecting countries across the economic and resource spectrum.
The strain is also renewing interest in rethinking how to overhaul the centralized, aging 20th-century energy systems. Many national electricity grids were built as urbanization and industrialization made it economical to generate electricity at massive power plants and transport it over long distances, despite the fact that “up to 35.655% of the energy transmitted is lost throughout this process,” a 2025 study in the Journal of Electrical Systems and Information Technology found.
The development of solar panels, batteries, smaller generators, and digital control has allowed energy production and storage to be partly decentralized. Some of these smaller technologies are classified as distributed energy resources (DERs), which can operate independently or feed electricity into the main grid, and be combined into microgrids to keep local areas powered when the wider grid goes down.
Most advanced decentralized energy development has occurred in wealthier countries with stable governments. Major private companies such as General Motors and Tesla can meanwhile use their own software to connect household batteries and solar panels to the grid.
But poorer countries and territories facing conflict, disasters, and general economic hardship are now testing whether DERs and distributed energy can help maintain electrification as older systems buckle.
Ukraine under attack
After more than four years of war, Russia has destroyed much of Ukraine’s larger power plants and transmission systems. “Russia has systematically targeted energy infrastructure with missile and drone strikes, destroying or occupying roughly two-thirds of Ukraine’s prewar power generating capacity,” states Ukrainian international investment company System Capital Management (SCM).
Amid constant rebuilding efforts, Russia is increasingly targeting smaller facilities as well. Having also severed its connections to Russian energy, Ukraine’s prewar generation capacity has fallen by almost half, from 56.1 gigawatts (GW) to 27 GW, according to a 2025 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Ukraine’s integration with the Continental European Grid has provided some relief via imports. But Ukraine is also building locally supported microgrids to reduce its dependency on vulnerable transmission networks while ensuring they are widely dispersed to make individual installations less attractive targets. Solar microgrids are keeping critical infrastructure such as hospitals and water systems running when the main grid fails.
Smaller gas turbines have proven useful, but renewable energy has become essential to maintaining energy supply. In 2025, Ukrainian company DTEK Renewables partnered with British clean energy company Octopus Energy Group to install rooftop solar and battery storage at 100 business and public sector sites over three years, according to SCM.
Ukrainian cities have meanwhile established “‘invincibility points,’ or earmarked emergency shelters equipped with heat, communication, and basic necessities,” states Business Insider.
The central Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia currently has five microgrids combining local generation such as solar, gas, and hydropower with storage, while five wind farms are to be added within the next two years.
Ukraine is also ensuring that its larger energy projects are geographically distributed. The pace of deployment in Europe’s poorest country amid the war has been striking. In 2025, DTEK and American company Fluence brought Ukraine’s largest battery storage online, with a total capacity of 200 megawatts; it is spread across six sites.
The approximately US$145 million project was built in just six months, a quarter of the time it takes comparable projects in Europe. Ukraine’s urgency has made it “one of the fastest-developing renewable markets in Eastern Europe,” according to the German-Ukrainian Energy Partnership.
The results are promising, if uneven. On sunny days, Ukraine’s solar capacity can produce large electricity surpluses, followed by severe deficits when conditions change or Russia attacks. The coming winter will test how far Ukraine’s emerging network of smaller generators, storage systems, and microgrids can reliably support the vulnerable centralized network.
Puerto Rico and self-reliance
Since 2017, a series of natural disasters have repeatedly exposed Puerto Rico’s vulnerable energy system. Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated the grid in 2017, leading to a blackout for 11 months, the longest in US history. This was followed by earthquakes in 2019 and 2020 and Hurricane Fiona in 2022.
The repeated shocks have produced blackouts, including a two-day island-wide blackout in 2025. “Puerto Ricans experience about 15 percent more service interruptions and about 21 percent longer outages than their fellow Americans on the mainland,” according to Politico.
Puerto Rico, the poorest US jurisdiction, has also faced an inconsistent response from Washington. After Maria, federal efforts initially focused on rebuilding the centralized grid and supporting fossil fuel generation.
The Biden administration later gave more emphasis to renewable energy and distributed systems, but bureaucratic delays slowed progress. The second Trump administration reversed course again, canceling up to $450 million in funding for grid resilience and distributed energy programs in January 2026.
Puerto Ricans, however, made early pushes toward self-generation. Rooftop solar nearly doubled in the year after Hurricane Maria. By 2020, engineering professor Agustín Irizarry Rivera told The Intercept that it had become cheaper for most energy users to “rely on solar panels than it is to pay PREPA’s [Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority] rates.”
He is also a member of Queremos Sol, or “We Want Sun,” one of several community coalitions advocating distributed solar adoption.
In 2023, rooftop solar and home battery and generator systems had become so popular that Puerto Rico’s private grid operator, LUMA Energy, began integrating them into the wider system through its Customer Battery Energy Sharing (CBES) program.
Privately owned batteries and other DERs are now integrated into a virtual power plant, allowing electricity stored in homes and businesses to be dispatched during peak demand or emergencies.
In June, during a power outage, for example, residential solar and home battery storage company Sunrun worked with LUMA to use energy from more than 33,000 homes to produce 30 MW during four-hour periods over two evenings.
In July, more than 70,000 household batteries provided 48 MW to the grid and helped avert a widespread blackout, showing how DERs can “respond to and help stabilize a stressed grid faster and more flexibly than centralized generation,” according to Pew Research.
Rooftop solar now supplies more than 10 percent of the territory’s electricity and has become Puerto Rico’s second-largest power generation source after petroleum liquids. By looking beyond the centralized system and failed attempts to repair it, Puerto Rican households and businesses have steadily constructed their own limited alternatives.
Cuba caught between decay and US pressure
Like nearby Puerto Rico, Cuba’s grid has been battered by natural disasters, but its aging centralized system, fuel shortages, and increased US pressure under the Trump administration have compounded its problems. On August 3, Cuba’s national electrical grid collapsed for at least the sixth time in 2026, after suffering another nationwide blackout the day before.
More than 90% of Cuba’s electricity has traditionally come from 16 major oil-fired thermoelectric plants, mostly built between the 1960s and 1980s. The collapse of the Soviet Union triggered severe oil shortages in the 1990s, until later support from Venezuela and Russia helped the system recover.
But Venezuelan oil exports to Cuba dropped sharply after 2015, and the grid began suffering repeated major failures from late 2024 onward, as fuel supplies dwindled and US restrictions further constrained access to imports.
With nine thermal plants offline due to breakdowns and maintenance, a system with roughly 3,000 MW of installed capacity was producing just 1,278 MW at peak demand in April, Electric Choice reports.
Even Cuba’s long-used distributed diesel generators, meant to keep critical systems running, are mostly paralyzed due to their reliance on imported diesel and fuel oil, while a US waiver allowing a Russian tanker to deliver about 700,000 barrels of crude to Cuba in March provided enough fuel for only a few weeks.
China has emerged as a crucial partner to fill the gap. Beijing unveiled a plan with the Cuban government in 2024 for 92 mid-sized solar parks with a combined capacity of 2,000 MW by 2028, with dozens online already. Spread across the island, alongside at least 18 smaller models, the parks are relatively quick to build and have reduced some of Cuba’s dependence on its handful of crumbling large power plants.
Chinese companies are also supplying equipment commercially: solar panel exports from China to Cuba rose from $3 million in 2023 to $117 million in 2025, according to energy think tank Ember. Households are also joining the movement — in Havana’s wealthier areas, residents are installing their own solar and battery systems to escape the unreliable grid, but upfront cost limits adoption in poorer areas.
Cuba’s decaying grid and pressure from Washington give it few options. Household systems have been able to reduce reliance on the old grid and distributed solar parks have begun to spread electricity production across the island, but growing uncertainty over Cuba’s energy security appears set to remain for the foreseeable future.
A decentralized future?
Ukraine, Puerto Rico, and Cuba all face different challenges, but collectively are struggling to keep their electricity systems functioning. Their problems also mirror developments emerging elsewhere.
Observing Ukraine, Taiwan is decentralizing its energy grid in response to potential Chinese threats. With Chinese companies manufacturing around 80% of the world’s solar panels, Latin American countries are similarly looking to China for alternatives to US political and economic dominance.
Ukraine and Cuba have become testing grounds for Western countries and China as both promote their energy technologies abroad as part of geopolitical competition. But the transformation is visible at the local level, with Puerto Rico showing how unreliable centralized systems and overlooking community needs can spur rapid adoption of distributed energy solutions.
Countries across the Global South are experimenting with localized energy systems, “leapfrogging” centralized grids that were never going to serve the remote rural communities in these regions.
Even the United States, despite its wealth and abundant energy resources, can benefit from the same approach. When some residents of Gary, Indiana lost power for up to two weeks in August, distributed systems could have provided valuable local backup.
Scaling challenges, particularly for local DERs, remain. But these examples show how to make electricity systems more resilient by expanding generation and storage across smaller networks; they are not just suitable for countries facing war and geopolitical pressure but can be adopted in any country where centralized systems leave communities vulnerable to disruption.
John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, DC, and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, “Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’”, was published in 2022. Follow him on X @john_ruehl.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and is republished here with permission..
