Before We Power the Future, We Need to Dig

NYC Just Showed Us Why…

People across New York experienced widespread blackouts this week as the city’s power grid failed under record-breaking heat, the first non-fire-related blackout in New York since the 1970s. As demand surged, the grid in some boroughs dropped to just 92% capacity, eliminating reserve margins. Con Edison issued brownouts, cutting voltage by 8% across Brooklyn and Queens, and thousands of residents in Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx lost power. The mayor asked New Yorkers to set their air conditioners to 76 degrees, even as outdoor temperatures soared past 100.

City infrastructure buckled under the strain: elevators shut down, traffic lights failed, and critical building systems faltered. Officials urged households to unplug appliances and run only one air conditioner at a time. Con Edison publicly asked residents not to use microwaves, dryers, or dishwashers during peak hours and even to avoid charging their electric vehicles. Similar power constraints were reported in Albany, NY.

In a city aggressively pushing toward electrification, telling people not to charge their EVs is a clear sign of how fragile the system has become.

So why is this happening? It’s not just about the heat, despite what the utilities and government are saying.

This is happening because, like much of the country, New York’s electrical grid was built over a century ago, right in the Financial District by Thomas Edison, for an era of radios and rotary phones. It was never designed to support a modern population running AC units at full blast while also powering AI data centers, EV charging networks, autonomous warehouses, and clean energy systems that now feed electricity back into the grid.

And this isn’t just a New York problem. Across the country, our electrical infrastructure is being pushed far beyond what it was built to handle. These systems were never meant for today’s speed, complexity, or scale. And no amount of clean energy generation, nuclear, solar, wind, or otherwise, can solve the problem if we don’t first upgrade the hard infrastructure that delivers power: the wires, transformers, substations, and the physical systems buried beneath our feet.

To put this into perspective: one high-speed EV charging station draws as much electricity as 20 homes. A single mid-size data center draws the same as 5,000 to 10,000 homes. At hyperscale, that number reaches 100,000. And it’s not just data centers and EVs, home upgrades like electric heat pumps are multiplying the load on local transformers. A single home switching from gas to electric heat can double its electricity demand overnight. These demands are being stacked onto a grid that can barely handle a summer surge.

And we’re only in the first inning. New York’s infrastructure—and the world’s—haven’t even begun to absorb what’s coming next: industrial robotics, humanoid robots, electric flying taxis, robotaxi depots, drone delivery networks, and a fully electrified public transportation system.

The Solution Begins with the Grid

Fixing the grid starts in the ground, literally. It can’t be patched. It needs to be physically rebuilt. And that’s not going to be led by consultants, software, or the utilities. It’s going to take boots-on-the-ground contractors, machines, and coordinated execution.

That’s exactly why Legacy Holdings launched The American Grid Company (AGC): to partner with and help scale the companies doing the real physical work required to prevent blackouts and upgrade the grid for what’s next. Real contractors. Real work. Trenching streets, setting conduit, upgrading substations, and wiring the infrastructure of the future.

We’ve been closely monitoring how fast the world is changing, and while we predicted blackouts would hit this summer, we didn’t expect it to happen in June. And we certainly didn’t expect it to happen in New York City, but we knew the truth long before the lights went out: rebuilding the grid starts in the ground.

That means real, physical, heavy civil work: trenching streets to lay new conduit, replacing transformers and substations, expanding underground duct banks, installing high-voltage lines, smart meters, battery systems, and “self-healing” switches that automatically reroute power when outages strike. Entire neighborhoods will need to be rewired from the curb to the breaker box. Substations must be scaled to handle volatile demand curves, and transmission corridors widened to deliver power from new energy sources, often located far from population centers.

And it doesn’t stop at the street. Over the next decade, nearly every building in America, not just in cities like New York, will need to be retrofitted to handle ten times the electrical load it was originally designed for. Homes will need new panels and upgraded wiring. Major facilities will require resilient backup power and microgrids to stay operational during outages. Schools and universities will build self-contained microgrids to support AI-driven classrooms and research labs that can’t afford downtime. Institutions like Stanford and Princeton have already launched billion-dollar initiatives. Hospitals, where power loss is life-threatening, are investing too. NYU Langone and Boston Medical Center are leading the way, building on-site systems to ensure continuous power during grid failures.

The family-owned contractors AGC is partnering with have quietly handled this type of physical work for decades, but they’ve never been publicized, funded at scale, or treated as essential infrastructure. Yet they’ve been managing every phase of grid modernization: bringing data centers, EV charging networks, and next-gen manufacturing facilities online and, of course, keeping New Yorkers’ lights and elevators working on the hottest days.

Without these contractors, there is no energy transition. No AI deployment. No electrified future. Full stop.

AGC was created to change that and to finally give these contractors the platform, capital, and coordination they need to lead the transition ahead.

The headlines will blame the heat. The utilities will issue statements. But beneath it all lies the uncomfortable truth: our built environment is not ready for the future we’re racing toward. The grid isn’t just breaking, it’s being outpaced. And no amount of policy, software, or ambition can fix it without boots on the ground and machines in the dirt. The transition ahead will be led by those willing to do the real work, digging, upgrading, wiring, powering, block by block, borough by borough. What happened in New York this week wasn’t a fluke. It was a preview.