New York suffered through an extended blackout in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, an issue that could have been avoided entirely given a rethink of how electricity is supplied to the city. The New Republic puts forward the idea of a decentralized power network, mimicking the physical topology of the internet while shunning the current system of having any one central point of failure in the grid. Rather than relying on substations for entire neighbourhoods, tenants could generate their own power through various methods and pass on the electricity to their local microgrid. The article suggests that the technical challenges aren’t impossible to overcome, but that the biggest hurdle facing decentralized energy is getting the utility companies onboard.