The IEA’s work on a more decentralized Ukrainian system is an argument from necessity. Large plants had become known aim points. Smaller and more local generation can keep pockets alive when the backbone is hit, if it can be protected and supplied.

Dispersed units are harder to erase in one strike. That is the military half of the argument, and it is the half that gets repeated. They are also harder to fuel, harder to guard, and harder to dispatch. A pocket that stays up is not a restored grid. It is a pocket. Necessity is why the IEA made the argument. Necessity did not make the small units simple.

Protection and supply are the conditions inside the claim, not a footnote under it. A local unit that cannot be fueled, or that nobody is guarding, is still an aim point. It is not yet a way to keep a town running. The patch works only while those conditions hold, and they are the part a romance leaves out.

That is not a claim that every town should buy an industrial microgrid this year. It is a claim that concentration is a military vulnerability, and that diversity of sources is a form of defense.

Diversity, in this use, means more than one kind of source in more than one place, so a strike on the known plant does not end supply. It does not mean a town has left the problem behind. A place that cannot fuel the small units, or tell them when to run, has moved the difficulty. It has not retired it.

For a household, the scaled version is modest: one legal way to run a few critical loads without backfeeding the line a crew is trying to repair.

Backfeeding is how a household plan damages the repair it is waiting on. A generator connected the wrong way can put voltage on a line the crew is treating as dead. The legal way is the arrangement that does not do that. This paper will not describe the wiring. The scale stays the one already stated: a few critical loads, done legally, and not a story about walking away from the grid.