Power Lines, Part 2: The Grid Is a Front Line

Welcome back, and thanks for being here.

Part 1 of Power Lines looked at data centers: the buildings where software becomes physical, and why they're now targets.

But a data center is only as reliable as the power that reaches it. This week is about that power: the grid.

A power grid has one unforgiving rule: supply and demand must match, second by second. If they drift apart, the grid's frequency moves, and protective systems start cutting off customers to save the rest.

Since October 2022, Russia has used that rule as a weapon. Missiles and drones have hit Ukraine's power plants, hydroelectric dams, and high-voltage substations.

By the end of 2023, about half of Ukraine's generating capacity had been occupied, destroyed, or damaged. Further strikes in the spring of 2024 left it with roughly a third of its pre-war capacity, according to the IEA. That summer, available generation fell more than 2 GW short of a 12 GW peak. The IEA warned that winter demand could reach 18.5 GW, leaving a possible shortfall of up to 6 GW even with imports.

For millions of Ukrainians, that has meant rolling blackouts, and for factories and hospitals, long stretches on backup generators.

In Ukraine, the grid isn't infrastructure behind the front line. It is part of the front line.

Most grids were built for efficiency, not survival: large central power plants, long transmission lines, and substations that step voltage up and down.

The hardest part to replace is often the least visible. Large power transformers are custom-built and heavy. In the U.S., the average wait for a new one was about 128 weeks, roughly two and a half years, in 2025. Prices have risen 77% since 2019, as demand from data centers, renewables, and grid upgrades has surged. More than half of U.S. distribution transformers are already past their expected service life.

That makes a substation a far better target than it looks. A single strike can remove equipment that can't be quickly replaced, even in peacetime.

The most valuable target on a grid isn't always the power plant. It's the equipment that takes years to rebuild.

Ukraine has responded the way armies have adapted to drones: by getting smaller, more numerous, and harder to hit all at once.

Instead of rebuilding only large plants, Ukraine has added distributed generation: gas turbines, gas piston engines, and diesel units spread across the country. Analysts at Rice University's Baker Institute argued in 2024 that the power sector should follow the same dispersal logic as Ukraine's military.

Lenders have backed it. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has financed about 350 MW of distributed gas-fired generation for the state energy company Ukrnafta, in two rounds.

The trade-off is cost. Small units are less efficient than large plants, and diesel is more expensive than gas. Resilience is being bought at a premium.

Ukraine is rebuilding its grid to survive attack, not to be as cheap as possible.

Grids also have alignments.

Until 2025, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were still synchronized with a Soviet-era network run from Russia. They'd stopped buying Russian electricity after 2022, but Russia still controlled the frequency their grids depended on.

On Feb. 8 and 9, 2025, they cut the last cross-border lines and joined continental Europe's grid. "This is freedom, freedom from threats, freedom from blackmail," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.

The switch was guarded. Poland and the Baltic states deployed navy ships, police units, and helicopters, weeks after an undersea power cable between Finland and Estonia was damaged. The project cost about $1.73 billion, with the EU covering roughly three-quarters. Russia's exclave of Kaliningrad, meanwhile, was left to run its own grid, and Moscow has built gas-fired plants there to do it.

Ukraine made the same move under fire. On March 16, 2022, three weeks into the full-scale invasion, its grid was synchronized with continental Europe's in an emergency procedure, before all the planned technical work was finished. A plan in the works since 2017 was brought forward under fire.

Synchronizing a grid used to be an engineering decision. In Ukraine and the Baltic, it became a security one.

The other weakness is time.

In the U.S., about 2,061 GW of new generation and storage was waiting to connect to the grid in 2025, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The median wait from request to operation exceeds five years. Of everything that applied between 2000 and 2020, only 13% was running by the end of 2025.

Militaries can't always wait. In 2026, the U.S. Army began negotiating to lease land at Fort Bliss, Texas, to a private developer for an AI data center that would build its own power, most likely gas. Plans have called for up to 3 GW, more than the whole utility serving neighboring El Paso.

That workaround has its own costs. The Army's solicitation rated El Paso's water risk "extremely high," and local officials have pushed back on gas generation close to homes.

When the grid can't keep pace with security needs, militaries are starting to build their own.

Three things stand out.

First, grids are now contested in three ways. They're bombed in war, as in Ukraine; chosen as a matter of alignment, as in the Baltic; and probed through sabotage, as with undersea links.

Second, resilience is moving from big and central to small and distributed. Ukraine is doing it out of necessity. Militaries are starting to do it by choice.

Third, distributed power still needs fuel. A thousand small gas engines need a reliable gas supply, which moves the weak point further up the chain.

There's a lot we don't know, including how much of Ukraine's capacity has been restored since 2024. It's also fair to note that large, interconnected grids exist for good reasons: they're cheaper, and analysts say frequency is easier to hold steady across a big synchronized area than a small one.

A grid is a shared bet that everyone connected to it is on the same side.

When that stops being true, every substation becomes part of the front line.

Next in Power Lines, Part 3: Who Controls the Fuel.

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