The World News

That's because it's shitty, neglected and aging and a lot of costs are due to the companies doing less than the bare minimum to maintain it over the years. It's not just one such companies that went bankrupt in the past, with their 'saddened' management walking away millions richer than they should've been.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/29/what-caused-the-blackout-in-spain-and-portugal-and-did-renewable-energy-play-a-part

Too much speculation, most of it from usual political corruption forces, that too much renewables were responsible. Batteries is an alternative to grid improvements, but in general, transformer failure is shit happening that is hard to preemptively replace just because they may be a bit old. Proper maintenance and weather proofing has let some last 100 years.

if $1T becomes a budget ask, most of that should be batteries. Lowering grid use with home solar, EVs with V2G enabled, are all better policies to avoid such a budget. Political system corruption favours centralized budgets paid to utilities instead.