Thread by @wmhuo168

The Grid and the Mandate, Episode 1: The Empire That Sold the Switch. 🧵

m.economictimes.com/magazines/pana…

Eric Schmidt is sounding the alarm: AI data centers will overload the U.S. power grid. But this isn’t a national crisis. It’s a turf war. The grid isn’t public. It’s privately owned. Schmidt just isn’t rich enough to control it. (1/18)

No level of U.S. government controls the energy infrastructure. It’s been deregulated, fragmented, and sold. Energy is an asset class. The grid is a portfolio. (2/18)

The 1990s were the inflection point. Deregulation was sold as freedom. What it enabled was chaos, market manipulation, and monopolies disguised as competition. (3/18)

Enron wasn’t an accident. It was the business model. California’s blackouts in 2000 weren’t mismanagement. They were profit. (4/18)

Fast forward to 2025. AI needs stable, scalable power. The U.S. grid is aging, patchy, and owned by private monopolies. (5/18)

Microsoft is trying to revive Three Mile Island. Amazon buys solar farms to bypass utilities. Meta wants its own nuclear juice. These are tech empires building shadow grids. (6/18)

Schmidt helped build the digital empire. But he forgot to buy the land. Now he’s locked out while younger barons seize reactors. (7/18)

There is no U.S. national grid. There are three semi-isolated islands and over 3,000 utilities. Many are controlled by private equity or pension funds. (8/18)

PG&E in California has killed people, burned forests, declared bankruptcy, and still pays dividends. That’s the American way. (9/18)

This isn’t dysfunction. It’s doctrine. The market replaced the state. Planning became speculation. Infrastructure became a security. (10/18)

BlackRock doesn’t care if the lights stay on. It cares about yield. The grid isn’t built for resilience. It’s built for returns. (11/18)

Now AI shows up and demands gigawatts. But America’s grid isn’t built for scale. It’s built for auctions. (12/18)

Schmidt isn’t warning us. He’s panicking. He doesn’t own the substations or the uranium. The new tech barons do. (13/18)

The future belongs to whoever controls the switch. Not the app. Not the algorithm. The switch. (14/18)

And the switch is owned by firms with no interest in national destiny. Just quarterly performance. (15/18)

The Department of Energy can’t compel PG&E. FERC mostly approves mergers. America has no strategy. Just regulators wearing ankle monitors. (16/18)

Meanwhile, China builds national grids, co-locates AI clusters with hydropower, and plans by the decade. That’s for Episode 2. (17/18)

America didn’t lose control of its grid. It sold it. Schmidt isn’t warning us. He’s asking to be let back into the control room. (18/18)