As the system comes back online and attention turns to the possible cause(s) of one of Western Europe’s largest peacetime blackouts, one thing is clear: without cash, the chaos would have been far worse.
They said it could never happen here, that Spain’s energy infrastructure was impervious to a massive, systemic outage. Circulating widely on social media today is a clip of the TV news presenter Javier Ruiz trying to debunk fears of a looming nationwide blackout. That was back in November 2021, when the Spanish government was locked in a months-long standoff with some of the country’s energy companies over surging energy prices:
“The fear [being spread] of a great meltdown, of a massive blackout, is unfounded, it is fake news. Spain has no risk of a blackout, whether for reasons of capacity or distribution, absolutely nothing points in that direction…
Our plants generate twice as much electricity as we consume on any given day. No, there is no risk of a collapse in the generation of power, just as there is no risk of a collapse of the nuclear power plants. Even if that were to happen,… ten different sources of energy feed the system. If the nuclear plants are shut down tomorrow, as some power plants have threatened, we will still have hydraulic power, wind turbines, solar power, other renewables, combined turbines and gas… This diversification of sources prevents a massive blackout.
Then yesterday, this happened:
A little after 12.30 pm, just about everything stopped working as Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France suffered one of the largest peacetime blackouts Europe has ever seen. In some places it would last for longer than 12 hours.
What first tipped me off was that the monitor of my PC suddenly went blank. I then tried the lights, which were also unresponsive. My initial thought was that the power had gone down in our apartment block, which occasionally happens as a result of nearby road maintenance works. And ironically, there were road works going on just outside my apartment. It wasn’t until my wife told me a few minutes later that the power had gone down in her workplace as well, which is roughly two kilometres away, that I realised something bigger was afoot.
I tried to look at the news on my mobile, only to find I had no connection. Minutes later, the connection briefly came back and I went to the home page of El País where the headline of the main story read:
“Massive Power Blackout in Spain and Portugal.“
…The worst electricity blackout in Spain’s recent history has unleashed chaos on Monday. Millions of citizens of Spain – except on the islands – and Portugal were affected. The blackout has paralysed the normal functioning of infrastructure, mobile communications, roads, train stations, airports, shops and buildings. Hospitals have not been affected thanks to the use of generators. The Spanish and Portuguese governments are investigating the cuts with different technical teams. Red Eléctrica, the public company responsible for the connections, has underlined the unusual nature of the moment: “Nothing like this has ever happened before, it is an absolutely exceptional incident”.
In one fell swoop, the blackout has taken Spain back to the nineteenth century. Traffic lights out of service, traffic jams, pedestrians wandering due to the lack of public transport, relatives desperate to communicate with each other, passengers without a train or flight, cancelled medical consultations, rescues in subways and elevators, refrigerators in restaurants and homes defrosting, radio transistors to get information amid the impossibility of using mobile data to connect to the internet and queues at the doors of some small businesses due to the closure of supermarkets are all part of the unexpected landscape of this Monday.
The trigger for the blackout appears to have been a sudden collapse in electricity generation.
“At 12.33 minutes, and for five seconds, 15 gigawatts of the energy that was being produced suddenly disappeared,” Red Electrica, the partly state-owned corporation that operates the national electricity grid in Spain, said in a statement. “And that is equivalent to 60% of the electricity that was being consumed.”
It is not entirely clear what was behind this sudden plunge in electricity generation, and will probably remain that way for some time. There are plenty of theories doing the rounds, however, including that it was the result of a cyber-attack — which, coincidentally, the European Commission was warning could happen just a few weeks ago with its launch of emergency preparedness kits. So far, both the Spanish and Portuguese governments and EU authorities have ruled this possibility out. Nonetheless, this was a common meme of the day:
Early reports out of Portugal suggested that the cause may have been meteorological. From Sky News:
A “rare atmospheric phenomenon” was blamed for the outages, which affected millions, Portugal’s grid operator, Rede Eletrica Nacional (REN), said in a statement.
“Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines, a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration,’” the statement continued.
“These oscillations caused synchronization failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”
However, as NC reader Grumpy Engineer, with 30 years’ experience in the power generation sector, says, “this sounds like baloney”. Here’s a more plausible explanation he has read:
[T]hey were experiencing grid frequency oscillations especially since they were running predominantly on inverter-based wind and solar power that lacks the rotational inertia of conventional spinning generations.
If this proves to be the case, they can make the system more robust by adding synchronous condensers, which are basically generators where the “prime mover” (like a gas or steam turbine) has been replaced with a big flywheel. This would permit grid operators to implement PSS (power system stabilization) technology per IEEE 421.5, which would definitely help damp out frequency oscillations. They’re not cheap to set up, but they do work.
This chimes with what the physicist and energy expert Antonio Turiel told Onda Vasca earlier today — namely that huge amounts of renewable energy have been integrated into the grid without putting in place the necessary receptive stabilisation systems, simply to save money:
“[At the time of the blackout] a lot of photovoltaic energy was being produced which, due to its technical characteristics, reacts poorly to shifts in demand. The problem with the electricity system is that you always have to anticipate changes in demand and photovoltaic energy is not very flexible in this respect, but that can be compensated for if you put in a series of devices that are obviously expensive but are useful for these situations.
As this has not been done, …most of Spain’s electricity was being supplied with photovoltaic energy, which is inflexible and could not adapt. So, what happened? Some systems began to go down and there was a cascading effect, which by the way, should not have occurred either, because when a system is overloaded, you can disconnect a subnetwork to protect it from burning out. But instead of that happening, the burden was passed from one subnetwork to another causing a cascading effect”.
Another likely, and related, culprit is chronic under-investment in the grid’s infrastructure, which in turn has lead to chronic under-capacity in the system. Between 2015 and 2020, 32% of planned investments in the grid were not executed, according to a recent report by PwC and Redeia. Ultimately, this is largely about money. As Turiel puts it, “in order to earn just a little bit more, the energy companies left the country in darkness.”
In an interview just three months ago with Colectiva Burbuja, Turiel cautioned that Spain had suffered five emergency power cuts in 2024, suggesting that yesterday’s events were just a matter of time. Then, in a blog post in early January he predicted that one or two European countries would suffer a major power blackout this year.
The electricity grids in many countries around the world are experiencing repeated blackouts, which are currently affecting Latin America and Africa. However, gas supply difficulties and overconfidence are leading to the acceptance of avoidable technical risks in Europe and the US. I see a certain probability of one or two fairly serious blackouts occurring in some European country during 2025.
In another interview today, this time with the podcast BASE, he warned that next time there’s a major power outage, it could take days or even weeks to put right.
What has the government said so far? Not that much.
In an emergency press conference at the Moncloa Palace on Monday afternoon, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that “no hypothesis is being ruled out”, though his government was prioritising getting everything back to normal as soon as possible:
We still do not have conclusive information about the reasons. I call for responsibility. The most important thing now is to follow the recommendations: let’s keep travel to a minimum, follow only official information and use your mobile phone responsibly. We are still going to go through critical moments. The telephone, only when strictly necessary.
This wasn’t difficult given that for most of the day the phone wasn’t working anyway. Even most landline phones were down since they also depend on an electric current these days.
As the chaos mushroomed, people suddenly found themselves unable to communicate with anyone digitally and not knowing why. There was a sudden rush for battery-powered radios at local convenience stores as people turned to 1960s technologies to find out what was happening. As far as I could tell, they were all sold out in my local neighbourhood within an hour.
There was also a mad rush for camping gas stoves as residents with electric-only cookers realised they had no way of cooking dinner. Other products that were suddenly in demand included candles, bottled water, first aid kits and, of course, toilet paper…
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Nick Corbishley 