At the end of April, a beautiful, temperate, lightly breezy day across the Iberian Peninsula suddenly turned into midnight madness.
All the lights went out. All the power across that huge swath of territory - Portugal, Spain, and parts of France - blinked out, not to come back on for hours.
BREAKING: Massive -- really, massive -- electricity outage hits Spain, which large part of the country suffering blackouts (including Madrid and Barcelona).
— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) April 28, 2025
Data from Spain's national grid shows a lost of >10 GW of demand, from ~26GW to ~12GW in a few seconds. Reason unknonw. pic.twitter.com/KwvDxOOLQJ
It stranded hundreds of people in elevators, on commuter trains, in pitch black train stations, and airports, as well as showcasing the vulnerability of a society that the European Union is trying to push to purely electronic financial transactions. The EU says it's for everyone's security of transaction, but they're not fooling anyone with half an unindoctrinated brain. Obviously, it's so the Brussels Brahmins can track the movement of individuals and cut off funds if one's future social credit score merits punishment.
There's still a fatal flaw in the system - ATMs and credit card readers do not work when there's no juice to make the data fly and magic happen.
As engineers across the continent scrambled to get the system restarted and rescue people, speculation was flying about what had caused the massive and sustained burp. Suspicion immediately fell on the renewables the Spanish Socialist government had been installing willy-nilly while retiring their steady, older, fossil-fuel-fired, reliable power generation far too quickly to make up the difference.
There were discussions about the lack of 'inertia' in a primarily renewable grid, causing system instability. Man, I learned a lot about how power grids operate in all the subsequent speculation on the cause.
More renewables will reduce the risk of blackouts and sabotage, said the media. But by reducing inertia on the grid, they led to the Spanish blackout. And now, the former head of the NSA & other officials warn that China put secret kill switches in inverters to sabotage the grid. pic.twitter.com/6lCpH9Owgm
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) May 16, 2025
Through it all, the Spanish government itself remained tight-lipped about the entire affair, out of embarrassment...who knows.
However, the fact remains that the Spanish government has committed the country to a wildly oversized reliance on the unreliable and was, even as late as last week, still obfuscating about the cause of the massive blackout.
...Last week, Spain's energy minister Sara Aagesen said so far it was clear an abrupt loss of power at a substation in Granada, followed by failures in Badajoz and Seville, led to a loss of 2.2 gigawatts of electricity, but that the precise cause was unknown.
In the wait for answers, some have pointed the finger at Spain's high reliance on renewables and reignited debates over plans to phase out nuclear power by 2035.
Are renewables to blame for the blackout?
Spain is one of the leaders in Europe's green energy transition and has ambitious targets for renewables to provide 81% of its electricity by 2030. Last year they accounted for a record 56% of the country's electricity and solar capacity grew at almost twice the European rate.
Shortly before the blackout, renewables accounted for around 70% of Spain's electricity production, mostly from solar.
This has been used by members of the opposition party and nuclear advocates to suggest that overreliance on renewables was at fault — which both the country's grid operator Red Electrica de Espana and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez have disputed. Nuclear currently provides around 20% of the country's electricity.
Misery compounded Spanish frustration as the country experienced another nationwide outage while still waiting for answers from its increasingly inept-looking and, as we say in the Marine Corps, 'OBE (Overcome by Events)' government.
Three days ago, every major telecom company went kaput. Only tiny little regional carriers had service.
"the outage, which began early this morning, has been linked to a botched network upgrade by Telefónica, causing significant disruptions, including the failure of 112 emergency lines".
— Robert Sasu | dev/acc (@SasuRobert) May 20, 2025
This is why you need a completely DECENTRALISED internet, one which is permissionless on all… https://t.co/H2xyYYXKKm
Oooh, people were HAWT.
All major mobile networks went down in Spain on Tuesday, just four weeks after the country was hit by a national power outage.
Movistar, Orange, Vodafone, Digimobil and O2 were all reported to have been affected by outages hitting professional services, including health centres.
Complaints soared as landline, internet and emergency contact services were knocked offline early this morning.
Madrid, Andalucía, Galicia, the Basque Country, Aragon, Navarra, Extremadura and the Valencian Community were all reportedly affected.
Networks contracted with Telefónica appeared to have been hit, but outages did not appear to be affecting individuals' network access.
But even with this second major outage, and hospitals and emergency services frantically trying to cope because they're tied into those same networks, the Spanish government still wasn't talking about what they had learned about the cause of the chaos the month before. What caused that initial substation to disconnect from the grid, which began the catastrophic cascade of failures?
Zipped lips. The government just...um...bumped up the nukes and backed off the solar.
Spain Quietly Boosts Nuclear And Gas After Blackout It Still Won’t Explain
It is still Spanish government policy to decommission every nuclear plant within a decade.
Spain is running its national power grid in “strengthened mode”, using more nuclear and natural gas in place of the renewables it vaunted before last month’s historic blackout, but still hasn’t said what started the outage. [emphasis, links added]
Spain still hasn’t officially acknowledged it knows what caused the historic blackout that started in the south of the nation and cascaded to knock out all electricity in two European countries. Still, it now says it is certain it wasn’t the victim of a cyber attack.
Two weeks after the total loss of all energy generation on the Iberian peninsula of Spain and Portugal, the national generation agency Red Eléctrica (RE) and the government ministry are now agreed there was no digital intrusion detected, Minister for Ecological Transition and Energy Sara Aagesen told their national Parliament this week, reports EnergyNews.
Suspicious, no? Even in a socialist country, the eyes of Europe, and in this day and age the world, are upon them. The Spanish are going to have to give up the whodunnit ghost sooner or later.
Welp. Looks like 'sooner' wins.
Leaks out of Brussels dump the blame purely in the lap of the Pedro Sánchez socialist government.
It has been alleged that the Spanish were running a clandestine 'experiment' to see how far they could push the system running entirely on renewables. No worries. It was only the health and welfare of the country at stake.
And one helluvan OOPS.
The stench of a cover-up hangs over Spain’s giant blackout, the worst electricity failure in any developed country in modern times.
Faith in the current investigation has reached rock-bottom. The socialist government of Pedro Sánchez is trying to buy time with explanations that either make no technical sense or veer into absurdity.
Red Eléctrica, which runs the grid, is accused of stonewalling everybody.
Sources in Brussels have told The Telegraph that the authorities were conducting an experiment before the system crashed, probing how far they could push reliance on renewables in preparation for Spain’s rushed phase-out of nuclear reactors from 2027.
The government seems to have pushed the pace recklessly, before making the necessary investments in a sophisticated 21st-century smart grid capable of handling it.
One is reminded of the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, which began as a test to simulate what happens to a cooling reactor in blackout conditions. Operators ignored warnings that the Number Four reactor had too little power. It set off a cascading failure.
If it is established that the blackout was a controlled experiment that went wrong, and if this information has been withheld from the public for almost four weeks, the Spanish Left faces electoral oblivion for a political generation.
The government has de facto control over Red Eléctrica through a golden share (in breach of EU norms). It put a socialist politician and party loyalist in charge even though she had no experience in the field and faced withering criticism at the time. Her salary in this plum job is six times higher than the Spanish prime minister.
The previous chief resigned in protest over political meddling. He accused the government of pushing its green agenda with “messianic” zeal – but without taking the accompanying steps needed to pull it off.
HOLY CRAP
There is not a single iota of doubt that, if any of this is true, why Sánchez and his toadies have been mum's the word, leaving the rest of the world baffled and waiting.
This has the potential not only to blow his government to smithereens, as it should, but thoroughly crush so many of the similar renewable fantasies already in motion across the globe...including here in the States.
And all the refiring of what additional traditional reliable power generation they have left...
The Spanish grid operator (Red Electrica) said that additional gas-fired power plants "are currently being included to reduce the impact that an abrupt output change may have over voltages." https://t.co/0qnPVEj1J7
— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) May 19, 2025
...isn't going to save the people who did this to the country and the damned lies they told while doing so.
The upside is that Pedro Sánchez has once again proven the socialist truism in real time.
