Blackstart: Power Grid Operator

Electricity is the one resource you cannot store.

You run a power utility. You buy the fuel, build the plants, sign the contracts, sell the electricity — and you hold your grid at 50.00 Hz, second after second, because nobody else will.

In most management games, power is a satisfaction ratio: overproduce and nothing happens. Here, overproduction costs you as much as a shortage. Every decision in the game comes from that tension.

It's 7:02 PM on a winter evening. The frequency is falling. You have ten seconds: fire up the ruinously expensive gas turbine, drain the battery, or shed a district?

What you're managing

Frequency. Supply and demand meet at 50 Hz. Too little generation and it drops — at 49.0 Hz the grid sheds districts on its own; lower still, and it collapses. Too much and it rises just as fast. There is no storage to hide behind, only the machines you can ramp in time.

Machines with personalities, not tiers. Fifteen kinds of generation, from diesel sets to a nuclear reactor. Diesel starts in seconds and costs a fortune. Coal is cheap and takes hours to warm, so you commit before you need it. Solar and wind are free and don't take orders. A dam is a finite reserve that answers instantly. A battery generates nothing — it buys you the minute you need to fix the real problem.

Fuel, stock, and the calendar. Coal arrives by barge with a lead time. Gas comes by pipeline — until the route is cut. Winter calls for one more plant every degree the temperature drops; summer heat waves do the same through air conditioning. Carbon is taxed, except where it isn't.

Neighbours who trade, and remember. Every grid has borders. Import when you're short, export when you're long — at a price that moves with the hour. Fail to deliver and the neighbour's trust falls; France has six borders counting on you at once.

Contracts and growth. A mine, a smelter, a data centre: each wants a flat load, a firm price, and no interruptions. Hold the contract and the region grows around your plants. Break it and the growth goes elsewhere.

When it goes dark

A blackout is not the end. It's the part the game is named after. Restore the grid zone by zone from the one machine that can start without power, re-synchronise, and bring the districts back before the cash runs out.

Thirteen regions, five continents

Each region is a different grid problem. Ghawar has fuel at the wellhead and no carbon tax — the place to learn frequency and merit order. The Yukon has four hours of daylight in December. Jutland runs on wind and loses its inertia with it. The Ruhr is a coal stock and a steelworks. Atacama starts with panels, a battery and a mine's contracts. Hokkaidō has heavy snow and no fuel of its own. Shanxi is the only grid big enough to carry a nuclear unit. France is the whole country on one console: 61 GW of nuclear, an 85 GW January peak, six borders.

13 regions · 15 kinds of generation · seasons, weather and a day/night cycle · borders that trade · contracts, R&D and a yearly balance sheet · black start

The free demo

This is a free demo: the two tier-1 regions, and the run stops at the first year's balance sheet — around two hours of play. Your save exports and picks up exactly where it left off in the full version, coming to Steam in early access.

Coming in the full version

Scenarios drawn from real days — the Iberian blackout of April 2025, Italy in September 2003, Texas in February 2021 — at several difficulty levels, from simple to very hard. You take the seat of the operators who held the grid those days. This game is our thanks to them.

Real-time with pause. Single player. Playable in French and English. Runs in the browser, saves locally, no account.

Made by DM Consulting. The simulation is written from scratch — no engine — and every number on screen comes from it.