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.