Blackout: Spain's dark day
The risk of rushing renewables and confirmation that Spaniards are the great social improvisors.
April 16th marked a milestone for Spain. For the first time, its electrical grid ran entirely on renewable energy, with wind, solar, and hydro powering the entire peninsular demand.
But history will only remember what happened 12 days later when the lights went out.
We started April with aranceles (tariffs) as the word on the tips of tongues, but ended it with a different A - apagón - as a massive blackout plunged the Iberian Peninsula into darkness.
In Spain, at least six people died due to outage-related causes. The economic damage could climb as high as €800 million.
The cause of the outage remains under investigation, but it highlighted the dangers of rushing into renewables and how dangerously dependent we’ve become on too few technologies.
Gone in 5 seconds
In the early hours of Sunday morning, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez took to social media to congratulate Copa del Rey winners FC Barcelona after an “electric final.”
The next day he was addressing the nation to explain how 60% of Spain's electricity production vanished in five seconds. Nobody was watching the press conference because nobody could watch. The power cut killed video, and for a day, radio was again the star. With no internet or phone signal, the only social networks were the ones found in the plazas and terrazas.
With candles in the kitchen and my trusty transistor radio, I listened to unsettling reports of people trapped in trains (some for more than 24 hours!) and metros and elevators.
While many embraced the unexpected Monday off, enjoying the warm spring sunshine, others were gripped with fear. People who rely on fridges to store medication or electronic respiratory devices faced hours of growing uncertainty, their wellbeing dependent on a grid that had suddenly gone blank.
In hospitals, non-critical surgeries were postponed. Some women even had to dar a luz - give birth - sin luz - without light.
A midwife in Tudela de Duero (Valladolid) told El País how, while waiting for the backup generators to kick in, a soon-to-be father had to hold up his phone’s flashlight so they could continue the delivery.
Today, an entire country is still asking the same question: what the hell happened?
Red alert
Red Eléctrica, Spain’s grid operator, believes the initial power failure was “very likely” caused by a solar plant generating less than anticipated, followed shortly by a “massive” drop in the production of other renewable electricity. In the Irish Times, Guy Hedgecoe reported that a glitch that preceded the outage originated in the southwest of the country, a hub of solar-energy generation.
According to Javier Blas, a Bloomberg opinion columnist covering energy and commodities, that there is another critical factor that has been left unsaid:
“Spain and Portugal were running their grid with a generation mix that relied heavily on the weather - for more than 75% of output. Few of the old-fashioned generators powered by gas, nuclear, and hydraulic force, which are key to ensuring a stable grid, were running.”
Blas emphasized that electrical grids dominated by solar and wind are inherently more fragile than those anchored by traditional power sources. The risks associated with the premature shutdown of reliable power sources were already well documented:
“In what today reads like a prescient warning, the parent of the Spanish grid operator wrote in February in its annual report that it faced challenges managing the system. ‘The high penetration of renewable generation without the necessary technical capabilities in place to keep them operating properly in the event of a disturbance [...] can cause power generation outages, which could be severe’ it said. Yes, they knew.”
But technical vulnerabilities aren’t the whole story - geographic and political factors left Spain dangerously exposed to a shock it couldn’t absorb.
Island in the sun
Warren Buffett once said that “you never know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out.” Spain didn’t realize that it’s connected to Europe’s grid by a thread until the power went out.
Despite being the EU’s fourth-largest economy and now a renewable energy powerhouse, Monday’s blackout showed that Spain is living on a thin line - and it’s prone to kinks.
“When it comes to electricity, the Iberian Peninsula is more of an island than Britain,” said Blas. Spain is connected to Europe’s grid via France, and Portugal is connected to it via Spain.
“The fact that the Iberian Peninsula is, in practice, an energy island hasn’t helped. Interconnections with the rest of the continent remain far lower (2%) than the European Commission demands (10%),” said El País. “And it’s not because Spain doesn’t want them, but because France has been resisting them for years. Some experts attribute this attitude to France’s attempt to protect its powerful nuclear sector from the competition posed by the much cheaper Spanish solar power.”
Yet when the grid collapsed, diplomacy and international cooperation proved critical.
France supplied 2,000 megawatts of power, and Morocco - despite its smaller capacity - diverted 900 megawatts, equivalent to 38% of its national production. Their support helped prevent an even deeper crisis, highlighting the value of strong cross-border energy ties at a time when Donald Trump thinks America can be great again by going it alone.
No Plan B
In an age of relentless distractions, we rarely pause to consider the invisible systems that power our daily lives. How do they actually work? But this week in Spain, when elevators, metros, phone service, and card readers all failed, it was clear: there was no Plan B.
In an editorial piece, La Voz de Galicia wrote:
“The concerns, which have been growing by the hour, all share a common denominator: the immense fragility of a system we believed to be highly advanced, developed, and reliable. None of that is true. It can't be that advanced if five seconds are enough to disrupt the lives of 58 million people. It can't be that developed if there's not even a Plan B to prevent the cascading collapse of the entire electrical system. And it can't be trusted if neither the government nor the power companies can guarantee it won't fail again, without warning, at any moment.”
The lack of contingency plans and delayed recovery times exposed the country’s over-reliance on an energy system that, while transitioning to renewables, wasn't yet equipped to handle such a violent jolt.
Spain aims to close four more nuclear reactors by 2030 with plans for renewables to make up 80% of its energy mix by then - but the blackout was a warning that a more cautious, gradual approach is needed.
Spain isn’t a Silicon Valley startup, it’s a country with vulnerable people. You can’t move fast and break things because when there’s a systemic failure like an apagón, people die.
In the same editorial piece La Voz de Galicia argued that the issue goes beyond just technical faults - it reveals a much deeper, more troubling vulnerability: a structural flaw that no modern nation should tolerate. In a world where so much of our daily life depends on invisible systems, even a small failure can have nationwide consequences:
“Whatever the cause, it’s hard for society to understand how something like this could even happen. How is it possible that the functioning of two entire countries can be disrupted by something as simple as a malfunction, an accident, or a sophisticated attack? How can the supposed "energy island" of the Iberian Peninsula be so unprepared for a chain failure, let alone a total collapse? How do you explain recovery times dragging on for hours? How can we accept that trains are stopped, airports are in crisis, traffic lights are useless, ATMs are offline, and phone networks are down? These are too many vulnerabilities for any serious country to overlook.”
The power outage highlighted how our growing reliance on complex, interconnected systems has left us more susceptible to systemic destruction.
“Little by little we have been creating more powerful machines capable of handling huge loads, but at the same time we are becoming more dependent on fewer machines,” said sociologist Fernando Vidal. “We now tend to make everything dependent on a single cable, a single machine, a single program. Everything hangs on a single thread, and we call that progress.”
Crisis fatigue
The blackout struck Spain at a time when the country was beginning to really show the strain from years of accumulating crises and climate-related shocks:
Covid-19
Filomena snowstorm
La Palma volcanic eruption
Record inflation
Valencia floods
Tariff threats
A generational housing crisis
Lenin said that, “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” The past five years in Spain have felt like 50.
Writing about what she calls the “Age of Angst,” Elif Shafak said:
“Information is about speed, discrete snippets of data, numbers. Between ‘numbers’ and ‘numbness’ there is more than rhythm and rhyme. When we are bombarded with so much information, we do not process what we read or what we hear. The moment we become so desensitized to the deluge of information that we barely register what is happening in another part of the world, or just next door, is the moment we are completely severed and disconnected from each other.”
There’s been so much to absorb that we don’t even know where to start. I don’t think Spanish society has processed the fact that 122,000 people died from Covid - more than the population of Girona.
There’s been no time to stop, reflect, or grieve.
At my local Mercadona, people were buying toilet paper like it was March 2020 (an unpleasant déjà vu), but thankfully, the blackout didn’t spiral into societal chaos or widespread panic.
That said, it did deepen that nagging sense of unease - the feeling that the world is becoming less stable, more fragile. Another shock to the system. Another reason for those trying to start families or build businesses to wait - often until it’s too late.
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Improvising in the dark
To enjoy Spain is to go with the flow. To overthink and over-plan is to miss out on what makes this country so special.
Spaniards are the great space optimizers and social improvisers. Within hours of the blackout, the initial confusion of a manic Monday shifted into a feeling of a lazy Sunday. With no work, no phones, and no social media, people drifted outside. Plazas filled up. Impromptu get-togethers and picnics sprang up, as people enjoyed the rare moment of having nothing to do.
Some small neighbourhood businesses like bars and shops that stayed open sold goods on credit to locals. In the barrio, trust is reciprocal. And besides, the beer wasn’t getting any colder.
In that moment, Spain’s resilience and resourcefulness were on full display. What might have sparked panic or looting elsewhere was met with a sense of responsibility and maturity - people understood their duty to act like adults. “Despite their reputation for proud, rebellious individualism, Spaniards are good at following norms,” wrote Michael Reid in Spain: The Trials & Triumphs of a Modern European Country.
Shock proof?
After that brief respite, Spain was back to its usual frenetic pace.
The rhythm of daily life resumed almost instantly, as if nothing had happened - a country hitting resume after the briefest pause on a treadmill still set to sprint.
As Jorge Dioni Lopez notes in Malestar de las Ciudades, “Neoliberalism needs constant movement—stability is its enemy. It needs crises and shocks.” The apagón was just the latest shock to keep us moving like frazzled hamsters. There’s no room in our economic system for reflection, because the moment we stop moving, we stop being economically useful.
The blackout, while a dramatic disruption, also highlighted the danger of Spain accelerating its energy transition. But Javier Blas wrote that it shouldn't trigger a retreat from renewables:
“The world didn’t walk away from fossil-fuel and nuclear power stations because New York suffered a massive blackout in 1977. And it shouldn’t walk away from solar and wind because Spain and Portugal lost power for a few hours. But we should learn that grid design, policy and risk mapping aren’t yet up to the task of handling too much power from renewable sources. Unfortunately, green activists believe such concerns represent little more than attempts to delay the shift away from fossil fuels. Instead, the renewable industry should lead the change with engineering and policy solutions. Failing to do so will undermine nothing less than the energy transition itself.”
Here in Galicia, the expression “malo será” epitomizes the resilience of the people from this damp corner of Spain. It’s used by Gallegos to convey the optimism that a difficult situation will turn out fine in the end. In Ireland, we have “(It’ll) Be grand.”
I wonder, though, how many more shocks can Spaniards take.
Until next time amigos,
Brendan
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Brilliant article as always.