I spent a year living off-grid.
Two outfits, both merino wool. Solar for power. A connection to the outside world that worked when the sky was clear. Water I had to think about. A rhythm set by sunrise instead of a calendar app.
I write about that year in my next book, because it did something to my attention that no app ever has. But that's not the point of this post. The point is what it taught me about infrastructure.
What's the pattern?
Every big system starts centralized and ends distributed.
Computing began with mainframes in guarded rooms. Now it's in your pocket. Media began with three networks. Now it's everyone. Power began, and mostly still is, a handful of giant plants pushing electricity one way down long wires.
That's changing, and the technologies doing it are the ones I lived on. A solar panel on a roof. A battery in a garage. A satellite dish that turns any hillside into an office. Each one takes a piece of the grid and moves it to the edge.
Off-grid living was the extreme test case. It proved the pieces work. The interesting future isn't a million people copying me. It's those pieces stitched back into the grid: rooftops feeding batteries feeding neighborhoods, so that when the big wire fails, the small ones don't.
Texas found out what a centralized grid does under stress in February 2021. Homes with their own solar and storage were the ones with lights on.
What should leaders do now?
So, three things. Especially if you run anything that depends on the grid staying up.
Ask how long you'd last if the wire went dead. A day? An hour? That number is your resilience, and most organizations have never measured it.
Move one thing to the edge. A battery, a generator, a solar array on the warehouse. Not to leave the grid. To have a second answer.
And watch the regulation. The rules for selling power back, for microgrids, for who owns a battery in a building, are being written now. The organizations in those rooms will shape a grid that works for them.
I came back from the jungle. But the jungle taught me what the future grid looks like: not one giant thing you depend on, but many small things you can trust.
If your power went out tomorrow, what would still work?
Related: Will AI's power bill decide who wins the next decade?
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