A week before Christmas, nearly 50,000 people living along Colorado’s Front Range lost power for multiple days. The outage was deliberate. Xcel Energy, the region’s utility, had implemented a “public safety power shutoff” out of fear that high winds would down power lines and spark fires. The danger wasn’t hypothetical. Conditions were warm and dry, with wind gusts exceeding 100 miles per hour. In 2021, a similar windstorm had led to the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history: the Marshall Fire, which destroyed 1,084 homes in the region.  Given the risk, the December 2025 outage may have been justified, but a grid that must be shut down for multiple days because of high winds — disrupting the lives of tens of thousands of people in the process — points to a deeper problem: America’s power grid is at a breaking point.…