How does modern electricity systems work and what are some theories about the future of power?

This needs some explaining – I’ll be brief.

Writing a sci-fi story. In it, this main power grid goes down. The one plothole I have is why doesn’t the main character just manually reset the system? From my understanding, when worse comes to worst, you can reset everything by some manual pump or something. Because that’s what elecricity basically comes from right? Some manual work that eventually converts to the traveling of electrons aka electricity? (I literally know nothing of how electrical power works so I’m just grossly simplifying it)

I need to work around the technology in the plot in order to bar the main character from just simply reseting the system manually. Since this takes place in the future, I was also wondering then about some speculations about what the future of getting power would be like. In other words, would be still be using electricity like. . . a thousand years from now? Maybe then I could think of another kind of theoretical system that isn’t as easy to reset as manually using a pump.