The International Energy Agency did not mince its words when, in February this year, it laid out the stark challenges facing electricity systems around the world.
Global annual investment in power transmission alone will need to more than double, from about $140bn in 2023 to as high as $300bn in the mid-2030s, if the world is to meet rising demand for power and emissions reduction targets.
"Around 1.5mn kilometres of new transmission lines have been built worldwide over the last decade, but inadequate transmission remains a major constraint on power system development, electrification and energy security," say IEA analysts.
China, which has a large and growing industry of electricity equipment and hardware suppliers, is well positioned to capitalise on the sorry state of the world's electricity transmission system, analysts say.
As if to make the IEA's point, two months on, in late April, Spain suffered a day-long blackout that cut power across everything from telecoms and internet networks to businesses and rail systems, with disruptions also hitting neighbouring Portugal.
For governments around the world, the outage emphasised the need to address under-investment in electricity networks.
This is viewed as necessary to meet not only rising demand for artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and data centres, but also the changing landscape of electricity generation from legacy systems powered by large-scale fossil fuel plants to dynamic and weather-dependent systems using increasing amounts of solar and wind.
But the urgent need to modernise the world's electricity grids, from poles and wires to the sophisticated software for dispatching power at the right place and time, has also highlighted the likely need to work closely with Chinese manufacturers that have found themselves at the forefront of an industry plagued with supply shortages.
The Iberian blackout was "just the tip of the iceberg", says Alicia García-Herrero, chief Asia-Pacific economist at Natixis, given that the Spanish grid was not in the worst condition compared with other transmission systems in Europe. "This is going to hit everybody."
With western manufacturers unable to keep pace with demand, China is now poised to make power equipment a "hugely profitable export market", adds García-Herrero.
According to Ken Liu, head of China renewables, utilities and energy research at UBS, supply of gas turbines and large power transformers face "severe" bottlenecks globally.
Turbines, which have become key to powering AI data centres, now have a lead time of more than three years, from about 18 months normally. While planned levels of transformer manufacturing will only meet half of new demand just from Europe and the US.
Global demand for distribution transformers -- used to step down high-voltage electricity from a power grid to flow into factories, businesses, data centres or residential areas -- is likewise expected to remain robust, Liu says, and in excess of what some of the leading western manufacturers have forecast.
The IEA has also noted that lead times for direct current cables, used for long-distance transmission lines, extend beyond five years while the price of cables has also nearly doubled since 2019.
"The combination of rising component costs, extended procurement lead times, and a significant backlog of orders is contributing to higher project expenses as well as delays," the agency says in its February report.
China is racing against time to avoid blackouts of its own. The country of 1.4bn people is in the middle of a significant move to decarbonise its economy, in part via the electrification of the transport and manufacturing sectors.
Beijing is sharply increasing spending across the sector. State Grid, which is responsible for about three-quarters of the country's electricity transmission, for example, plans record spending of Rmb650bn ($89bn) this year alone. But compounding the challenges for China has been power consumption beating forecasts and hitting record highs this year, with increases across the services and industrial sectors as well as from residential demand.
"Transmission and distribution, both, are in tough states," says David Fishman, a Shanghai-based China power sector expert at The Lantau Group, a consultancy. "They are still behind, and I imagine they'll stay sprinting just to stop falling further behind," he added.
UBS analysts, however, are upbeat on the prospects for a clutch of Chinese manufacturers to benefit from strong export growth including turbine maker Yingliu, and Sieyuan and Sanxing, leading producers of transformers and other power sector equipment.
And Fishman was confident that Chinese power equipment manufacturers would be well placed to overcome any current shortfalls in production to meet rising global demand.
"As long as the IP [intellectual property] is Chinese and the barrier is scaling up, then there is no barrier, because that is what China does very well," he added.
The prospect of more and more Chinese-made equipment in grids around the world poses national security risks linked to economic dependence as well as espionage and military threats, western analysts have said.
García-Herrero of Natixis expects that while the prospect of more reliance on China will provoke debate in some countries, ultimately nations will need to prioritise shoring up their electricity systems.
"It is just how bad the situation is. I'm sure there will be threats from the geopolitical side. But the grid is just so important. Look at what happened to Spain."