The Contrast

In 60 years, NASA went from mechanical slide rules to digital enabled autonomous spacecraft while the U.S. electrical grid still relies on mechanical infrastructure that predates the pocket calculator.

The grid powers every critical system in our society, from hospitals to water systems to financial networks, yet its technology is more akin to the Apollo spacecraft than the Artemis II mission that just came home.

From Dials to Digital

The Apollo missions of the 1960s relied on mechanical dials and switches and a single flight computer with so little memory it could barely hold a modern spreadsheet. The crew and ground control manually fed in every guidance correction.

Orion, the spacecraft that just carried the Artemis II crew, had two simultaneously operating redundant digital control systems. Each computer is 20,000 times faster than Apollo's. More than 1,200 sensors fed data into software-driven controls that made real-time autonomous adjustments, freeing the crew from the constant manual monitoring Apollo demanded.

Meanwhile, Back on Earth

In comparison, the U.S. electrical grid remains, at its core, a mechanical, manual system. When it fails, customers still have to call a phone number to report it. Response times run in minutes, hours and sometimes days.

The grid simply never made the technology leap from a primarily mechanical system to the digital, software-centric system required to bring it into the 21st century.

The Digital Revolution Comes to Power

Over the last 50 years, software-driven digital systems replaced mechanical ones across every major industry from computing to telephony to automobiles. In each case, mechanical hardware was replaced with software-defined systems that were smaller, faster and smarter than their predecessor.

The digital revolution that transformed computing and telephony was built on silicon transistor technology. But silicon breaks down under the high voltages and currents that flow through power infrastructure, which is why the grid was left behind while everything else went digital.

That barrier has now fallen.

Why Now?

New semiconductor materials—silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN)—can handle the extreme electrical demands of power systems. For the first time, the technology that transformed computers is available to power infrastructure.

Matthew Reynolds, Marketing Manager of Energy Management at Infineon Technologies, which manufactures silicon carbide and gallium nitride semiconductors for power applications, put it plainly: “With SiC and GaN, the grid can be controlled with the speed and precision we expect from modern electronics, delivering higher efficiency and the reliability utilities need as they integrate renewables, EVs and bidirectional power.”

The market is already moving. In 2025, Eaton, a $25 billion power infrastructure company, acquired Resilient Power Systems, an Austin-based startup that makes ultra-compact solid-state transformers using exactly this technology.

The Stakes

The grid's digital transformation is not a question of if, it is a question of how fast and that matters more now than ever.

Rising electricity demand from AI data centers and electric vehicles is straining a grid that was not designed for distributed generation, two-way power flows or intelligent loads that didn’t exist decades ago.

Today’s grid needs to dynamically orchestrate power sources in real time, balancing supply and demand across millions of endpoints simultaneously. It requires exactly the kind of fast digital response and software-driven intelligence that just guided a spacecraft to the moon and back.

The Decision

We decided returning humans to deep space was worth it. Now we need to decide if the grid those astronauts just came home to deserves the same commitment. The technology exists. The investment case is compelling. The only thing left is the ambition and will to get it done.