Power outages aren’t just frustrating—they’re expensive. In 2025, commercial blackouts are more frequent and more expensive than ever - driven by grid strain, climate events, and aging infrastructure. If your business still treats them as rare inconveniences, it’s time to rethink your risk exposure. As commercial and industrial business owners, you know that every minute of downtime can translate to lost revenue, damaged equipment, and tamper with customer trust. But do you know how much a single blackout could cost your bottom line?
What Blackouts Are Really Costing You
Let’s break it down. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, . For large enterprises, downtime can mean millions of dollars lost per hour—imagine the impact on a factory floor, a data center, or a busy fulfillment hub. Data centers, for example, face outage costs averaging $9,000 per minute, according to industry research. That’s not a typo: one hour of downtime could wipe out over half a million dollars in revenue, not counting the ripple effects on customer satisfaction and supply chains.
But it’s not just the obvious losses. Power disruptions can damage sensitive equipment, delay operations, and leave your workforce idle—costing both time and productivity. In industries like manufacturing, a brief outage might cost tens of thousands of dollars. Still, if equipment cools and production halts, the tab can skyrocket into the hundreds of thousands, with recovery times stretching from hours to days. Data loss and IT disruptions can be even worse for businesses that run digital operations, eroding trust and complicating disaster recovery efforts (think system reboots for entire servers and networks).
Why Blackouts Are on the Rise
So, what’s driving this surge in risk? For starters, electricity demand is climbing, especially from facilities like data centers, which currently consumes just over 4% of total U.S. electricity - a share that could rise to 15% by 2030, according to DOE projections. As a result, utilities are under pressure to supply more power, investing record sums in electrical infrastructure, but wholesale prices are projected to rise steadily in the coming years —up 19% on average between 2025 and 2028—and those costs are often passed down to commercial customers. Meanwhile, extreme weather events make outages more frequent and unpredictable, turning what was once considered a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence into a boardroom-level threat.
A Smarter, Resilient Way Forward
The good news? You don’t have to be at the mercy of the grid. Distributed generation solutions offer businesses a more resilient way forward. By investing in onsite power generation, like a Connected Microgrid®, you can keep critical operations running, with short-term outage protection for your equipment, and even save on energy costs in the long run. These solutions shield you from the steep costs of blackouts and position your business as a leader in energy resilience.
Partner with Us
The cost of doing nothing is too high. Whether you’re a factory, a data center, or a logistics hub, the question isn’t whether you’ll face a blackout—it’s when. How prepared will you be? Give your business the best chance by planning and considering a continuity plan that will see you through. Contact our Energy Experts today to learn how we can help.
