Do you have suggestions for the utilities on how to move away from a centralized grid, avoiding bankruptcy and also providing the same level of reliability as the last few decades?
The only supply side outage that comes to my mind is the Texas cold snap messing with the gas plants.
Perhaps neighborhood level energy storage and an increase in energy transmission costs.
It's very unlikely that a centralized grid will go away, society wants 100% energy availability 100% of the time. So like everything else, people are just going to have to pay for it. The same way you pay for schools even if you don't have kids or pay for roads even if you don't have a car.
It's a tough problem. Trillions of dollars of utilities bonds (mostly owned by pension funds) and a century of regulatory barriers make change hard. The problem is similar to the task of reforming the medical system.
The strategy that I like is to build out distributed systems in "non-integrated areas". These are locations that are not served by the grid and often have a tiny local grid that provides high cost electricity (~1$/kWh). These areas represent test beds for distributed energy tech and might be a place where de-costing and scaling strategies could be developed.
Another strategy is to wait for baby boomers to die. :)
With 4-5 MW batteries in the shape of shipping containers are already now available and rated for 6-10k cycles before much degradation. I think local neighborhood storage near consumption should become common in the near future. Of course electricity distribution companies etc will drag their feet specially in the US with their captured markets and near monopolies.
The only supply side outage that comes to my mind is the Texas cold snap messing with the gas plants.