What's the alternative? Equity is important, sure, but to swing all the way towards "only a centralized grid should be allowed in order to make sure all have the same level access" is a head-in-the-sands approach that ignores realities such as how the centralized grid out there has metastasized into a non-functional bureaucratic blame-shifting machine (at least measured by the increasing frequency of outages). A centralized grid also never actually delivers true equitable access.

One alternative is decentralization, and the article talks about that:

> The town’s local environmental nonprofit Casa Pueblo teamed up with researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to develop a way to connect multiple microgrids to exchange power with one another, all without having to be hooked up to Puerto Rico’s grid. The strategy, called grid orchestration, ensures that if power is knocked out on one of the installations, the others aren’t compromised.

Is it the wealthy that are doing that? Maybe? Probably? But isn't that how any R&D technology investment starts?

It's also involving a government-funded lab to re-envision how these systems could work to achieve resiliency through coordinated decentralization. And if there's any truth to trickle-down economics, it would have to be in something that allows for a decentralized approach accessible to many, not a centralized approach that only rewards r > g accumulation. Sounds like a good use of government research funding to me.