When the Grid Goes Dark by Kai London
Almost every continuity plan assumes electricity. Extend the outage beyond a generator's fuel window and the assumptions behind payments, water, telecommunications, fuel distribution and cooling start to fail in sequence. When the Grid Goes Dark is a planning book for that scenario — analytical about causes, practical about consequences.
What the book covers
Dependency cascades
How loss of power propagates through telecommunications, water, fuel, payments and logistics, and where the sequence bites first.
Causes without speculation
Weather, equipment failure, market and demand events, and cyber-related disruption treated as categories of cause rather than as attributed events.
Safe shutdown and restart
OT and process safety in degraded conditions, and the discipline of controlled restoration.
Continuity beyond the generator
Fuel logistics, load shedding, minimum viable service definitions and manual fallbacks.
Communications and mutual aid
Reaching staff, customers, regulators and partners when normal channels are unavailable.
Governance and exercising
Decision thresholds, who can invoke them, and how to rehearse a long-duration scenario credibly.
The book does not attribute outages to named states or actors, predict events, or present casualty or impact figures; it sets out planning method.
Who it is for
Utilities and energy operators, OT and plant engineering leaders, business continuity and crisis managers, hospital, transport and data-centre operators, and boards accountable for essential services.
About the author
Professor Kai London — CISSP, CISM.
An internationally recognised cybersecurity executive, board advisor and Founder & CEO of Quantum AI Systems Security LLC, writing at the convergence of AI, governance and operational resilience. Honorary Professor and Researcher at UCL.