Is one of the purposes of the tidal power outages to dupe and convince humanity they need small, local grids built on green energy and battery storage, rather than large grids fed by fossil fuel or nuclear power plants?

You are putting two and two together quite nicely with your intuition. That, indeed, is part of the orchestration underway. As with many nefarious schemes of the Extraterrestrial Alliance, this is meant to influence a number of things simultaneously. It is not only a financial disruption but an erosion of human self-control by disempowering your governments through a challenge to the basic infrastructure. In addition, it worsens things by further misdirecting humanity to take away what is working in the way of fossil fuel energy sources and trying to implement, wholesale, the widespread conversion to green energy alone. And while the energy storage problem is greatly facilitated with the recent advent of more efficient battery storage, there are still enormous infrastructure costs to have a working power supply for an entire nation and then around the world. The problem, as we have pointed out, still remains, "Where is that electricity to come from? Are the solar and wind farms up to the challenge?" At the present time, this looks doable only with a decline in quality of life by making something inadequate a central limiting factor in the workings of the economy.