Sostratus
Deity
My assumption was that since discontent about living standards is almost universally conveyed by amenities in VI, that gating modern+ amenities with power would be the way to go. I mean you could even add power needs to neighborhoods if you really wanted to enforce the idea that major metropolises need electricity.On power = amenities.
A couple points about power as it stands:
there does not seem to be a prioritization on power source. I built precisely one nuke plant and used 2x Tesla on it, and for a few turns my entire empire converted to the way of the atom. But then, inexplicably, it went back to purely coal. I couldn't get it to go back to nuke. Very frustrating. I would have thought they'd have set things so nuke>oil>coal, but maybe not. I suspect the distributor function just runs down your city list or something. This needs to be internally fixed so we have 3 lists (one for each power source) and they are allocated in order. Outside a warming context, I would say fuel value is uranium>oil>>coal in that those fuel resources are extremely valuable for the military late game while coal is more by the wayside.
Even if the plant isn't providing power to that city, if it has a strong enough aura it will overpower a local plant. (Unlike what the tooltip suggests about a local plant blocking all others.)