There is also a character who used to work for Google who walks around pointing out all the things that don't make sense in their world and being pissed off that nobody else seems to care about the science

That's actually pretty funny.

Towards the end of this article [link] Misha Collins spoils a bit about Castiel's state of mind.

OK - here is a possible explanation of what is happening in "Revolution". The TV show is sort of a sideways spin off Stirlings the emberverse which in turn is a spin of a time travel alternate universe story. And that alternate universe story has a throwaway explanation which I don't know ever made it into the emberverse because I never bothered with the emberverse.

The time travel story is basically an entire New England Island is thrown into the distant past. The inhabitants of the island having guns and the ability to make more set out to conquer the ancient world and bring democracy and flush toilets. (This is seen as a good thing.) Some other people who were on the island want to conquer the world for bad reasons.

Meanwhile the ancient version of the island came into our time. And our time was altered in such a way as to suppress electricity creating the emberverse.

OK so what cause all this? Well it is not in the plot of the time travel series at all. But there is a one page author omnippent toss off in which it is revealed that a superbeing did all this deliberately for shits and giggles. So basically it was done by Q from Star Trek! (Since the superbeing is left unnamed and undescribed by Stirling we can assume it is Q if we want.)

And if this is done by Q then, he might have cooled the cores of the nuclear reactors so that having a bunch of reactors around would not spoil his fun. He might have brought down the jets with lights still on and shut off the electricity gradually because it was more fun that way. Once you have "superbeing" as an explanation, you can fit in pretty much anything.

Superbeing is not particularly compatible with having amulets that turn the lights on, or people who knew in advance that this was coming. So I'm not that sure that this will be what is happening in the TV series. Q is OK for individual episodes but as the explanation of the key premise of a series he is lousy story telling. Still I suspect that some modification of this is being used in the series. Maybe something more on the lines of a mad scientist....?

Are these spoilers or speculation?

They are based on source material. So there is a better chance of them being real than something just off the top of my head. In general if a series is based on source material, even though it is always speculative that the source material will end in the series, I assumed that it constitutes a spoiler. Maybe I'm wrong. For me I've never been fond of how spoiler phobic we are, but it is the culture so I try to comply.

To be clear - the alien superbeing as creating the situation is a spoiler. And like many spoilers not absolutely certain. A spoiler leaked by the show-runner may be a foiler. In my case the show may not go the same place as the source material. But definitely in the source material the ultimate explanation was "alien superbeing".

The rest is speculation based on that spoiler. Calling the superbeing 'Q' is just me being a smartass. But the 'alien superbeing' thing was in the source material of the source material.

I thought that it was stated that this isn't related to the Emberverse. Can you point me to the cite?

This isn't related to the Emberverse? Sorry I had the impression from discussion that it was. If the series is not related to the emberverse then the post is completely wrong. It is not even good speculation cause it is based on Revolution being derived from the Emberverse. I got the impression from the boxed set discussion that the Emberverse was the source material for this. Should I delete?

I have never seen a shred of show-related material that said it was, and only people saying it's not. Which is why I'm trying to chase down this idea it is to a source. If I can find that, I'll correct myself, but I've seen nothing but "I think" and "it seems" so far. The premises have been stated to be explicitly different¹, and I'm not sure why people are drawing such bold lines between them.

¹: Guns, for starters.

I think the credits read "Created by Eric Kripke," which would mean it's not based on any underlying source material.