May 16, 2025

Combinder and peaq: A Cure for Blackouts?

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After a severe 2025 blackout crippled Spain and Portugal, the writing on the wall is clear for centralized grids. Here’s how Combinder and peaq’s decentralized energy network could be the key to upgrading the grid with a resilience layer for last-mile power distribution. This layer would massively reduce the fallout from failures of the transmission grid and help to avoid them in the first place.

On April 28, 2025, a major blackout in the Iberian Peninsula left millions without energy, leading to 8 deaths and an economic loss in the range of up to 4.5 billion euros, according to Reuters.

Although the root cause is not yet clear, the blackout happened due to a drop in energy from 32 GW to 10 GW. This fluctuation made it impossible to meet the energy requirements of 60 million people, leading to public transportation collapse, telecom disruption, an economic loss of over $2 billion, chaos, and even the loss of 8 lives.

Now, a deeper analysis shows that the issue is related to the fragility of the energy grids. Consider this: At the time of the incident, 71% of the energy produced originated from solar and wind power, which is more sustainable, but less reliable than other sources. In a decentralized grid, that’s fine: It has the flexibility and excess capacities to weather sudden supply or demand swings. The problem is, though, our grids aren’t decentralized. Quite the opposite.

In a centralized grid, a sudden drop of 22 GW is enough of a shock to trigger a massive shutdown. The Iberian grid literally shuttered itself from the wider European network. And with hypercentralization, this could only mean one thing: Lights out.

The technological answer to prevent future blackouts exists, and it includes decentralized energy infrastructure powered by peaq and Combinder.

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The Missing Safety Net: Decentralizing the Energy Grid

Hyper-centralized grids struggle with flexibility, which amplifies the crisis potential of even a small mishap. Part of the problem is, they don’t account for local sources, such as private solar panels or generators, and cannot adjust the demand on the go. They simply weren’t built for that, their entire point is to bring energy from point A (the power plant) to the entire alphabet. Thankfully, flexibility is exactly what peaq and Combinder bring to the table.They make the grid intelligent, adding the flexibility and responsiveness needed to handle these bidirectional energy flows across millions of decentralized devices.

And remember how we mentioned sustainable energy being more volatile? Combinder solves this through smart load balancing, activating local flexibility reserves exactly when and where needed to smoothen out production gaps and demand spikes.

This capacity can come in handy not just to offset the specifics of sustainable energy, but also as an extra safeguard in the face of other crises, be it an on-site accident, a natural disaster, or even a cyberattack, which are only set to grow more sophisticated with the rise of AI. And speaking of AI, grid flexibility is an obvious major boon for an industry that relies on data centers that guzzle as much energy as the entire Tunisia.

The only way of preventing the energy grid from snapping in the future is by decentralizing it with the help of Combinder and peaq.

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How Combinder and peaq Prevent Blackouts

According to one of the leading studies in the field, a key factor for increasing grid resilience is the capability to precisely create Distribution State Estimates. Here’s what it comes down to: While we have good monitoring for major power lines, we're essentially blind to what happens beyond your electric meter in homes and businesses. This gap in data makes it hard to manage the modern grid effectively, especially as more people install solar panels and electric vehicle chargers.

To solve this, two things are critical:

First, technical capability — we need new infrastructure that enables secure, real-time data sharing.
Second, trust, consent and incentivization — residents and businesses must retain ownership over their data and willingly participate by sharing the more granular data on their energy use.

That’s why we are building Combinder on peaq. Combinder stands for Combination of Distributed Energy Resources. It’s a highly effective solution to close the data gap behind-the-meter. It empowers citizens to share their energy data securely, preserve their privacy, and actively participate in the financial returns of the network.

To Energy Service Providers, Combinder provides a unified API with access to a variety of DER types and brands, promoting innovation in the fast growing sectors of Demand Response, Power Plants and Energy Communities.

By aligning incentives at the individual level, we can unlock unprecedented grid flexibility and resilience — turning millions of residents and businesses into active partners in avoiding the next black out.

Combinder and peaq bring the tech needed to create decentralized energy grids by creating global virtual power plants that stabilize energy grids and support the future growth of energy demands. And the best thing about it? Anyone can join today with a step as simple as connecting a Shelly Smart Plug to beta.combinder.io.

Wait, did you say “virtual power grids”?

Yes, and here’s how it works:

Combinder’s virtual power plant works by connecting household devices, from EV chargers, solar panels, AC units, batteries, and any other device, to a decentralized network. This allows for AI agents to optimize the energy grid in real time.

For example, during the recent blackout, Combinder could have easily reduced the power demand by adjusting millions of devices (e.g., reducing thermostats or turning off non-essential devices such as air conditioning devices), or activating energy stored from home batteries. This demand response would have mitigated the 22GW energy shortfall in the recent blackout and eliminated the negative effects of the blackout.

Additionally, Combinder can create a peer-to-peer energy marketplace that allows prosumers (producers/consumers) to sell and allocate excess energy in the most effective manner possible.

In the meantime, peaq is the backbone of this decentralized infrastructure, by providing Combinder with the decentralization, security, and machine-to-machine communication needed. Additionally, peaq makes decentralizing microgrids possible, making it virtually impossible for future blackouts to happen.

This is possible thanks to peaq’s scalable transaction layer, which can handle millions of homes on Combinder.

A future with Combinder and peaq is a future with cheaper electricity, a much more resilient energy grid, no blackouts, and no “snap” risks from AI energy-hungry datacenters or sophisticated cyber attacks.

The world needs a better energy grid. The world needs Combinder and peaq.

Join the Combinder community, participate in their Beta program, and follow them on X for all the latest info.

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