On Monday, April 28, just after 12:30 PM local time, Spain and Portugal switched off. A massive power outage left the entire Iberian Peninsula and a small part of southern France without phone lines, electricity, and Internet for more than twelve hours. ATMs and traffic lights shut down, over 300 flights were canceled, hospitals resorted to generators, and 35,000 people had to be rescued from stranded trains.
The blackout is said to have claimed at least three lives: a married couple and their adult son, who reportedly died from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a faulty generator. As the search for causes and culprits begins, political accusations are starting to fly.
Early Monday evening (in a press conference not seen by most Spaniards until hours later), Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s Socialist prime minister, said the cause of the blackout was still unknown, but that he wasn’t ruling out any hypotheses. The following day, as most services in Spain and Portugal returned to normal, Sánchez announced that his government had established an “investigation commission” to examine the role private energy companies may have played. Meanwhile, Portugal’s prime minister, Luis Montenegro, requested an EU enquiry in order to meet the demand for “quick, urgent answers”—although Beatriz Corredor, the president of Spain’s national grid operator Red Eléctrica (REE), announced two days after the blackout: “We know the cause… [B]ut the thing is that there are millions of pieces of information [to analyze].”
REE has confirmed that at 12:33 PM on the 28th, Spain’s electrical grid suffered two disruptions, about 1.5 seconds apart. It recovered from the first, but the second caused a gigantic loss of 15 GW from the system, equivalent to double the combined capacity of the country’s five nuclear power plants, and 60% of the electricity being consumed. Eduardo Prieto, director of operations at REE, said: “A second and a half may not seem like much. Indeed, it is nothing for any human action. In the electrical world, it is a very long time.” The question is what caused these spooky convulsions, which together lasted about five seconds.
The more disturbing, but least credible, hypothesis is that the generation gap was caused by a cyber-attack, similar to that launched against Ukraine by Russian hackers in December 2015. Fabricated reports were already circulating by Monday afternoon, one of which falsely claimed that “Russian state-backed groups [are] the primary suspects” and that EU Council president Ursula von der Leyen had announced a “direct attack on European sovereignty.” But by Tuesday afternoon, the possibility of a cyber assault had effectively been ruled out by the Spanish and Portuguese governments, both countries’ grid operators, and the EU’s energy commissioner Teresa Ribera. Still, this hypothesis is being investigated by Spain’s National Cryptology Centre (INCIBE) and Joint Cyber Command, which report to the National Intelligence Centre and Ministry of Defence, respectively. The country’s highest criminal court is also investigating the possibility that the blackout resulted from “an act of cyber-sabotage,” and has ordered separate reports from REE and INCIBE.
Precedents suggest that the Iberian outage was probably due to something more innocuous. On September 28, 2003, the whole of Italy and parts of Sweden lost power for twelve hours; and in June of last year, a blackout affected Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Albania, and Croatia. In both cases, the culprits turned out to be rather less menacing than an evil hacking genius: trees touching power lines triggered chain reactions, leading to massive blackouts.
Unruly vegetation hasn’t been blamed for the Iberian outage, but initial reports suggested that weather might have been a factor. These quoted the Portuguese grid operator Rede Eléctrica Nacional (REN) as saying that “extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain [caused] anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 KV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration.’” But on Tuesday, REN denied having issued any such statement.
The most politically charged hypothesis is that the grid disruptions were caused, at least in part, by renewable energy. Sánchez won’t entertain this possibility, as too much is at stake: Spain is leading Europe’s green transition, and last year generated a record 57% of its electricity with renewable energy. But REE’s operations director has said it’s “very possible that the affected generation could be solar.” In an annual report published in February, REE’s parent company warned that the increased use of renewable energy in Spain’s grid could cause “severe” disruptions to the country’s electricity supply.
For the Spanish right, this is evidence of a damaging obsession with green policies. The Conservative People’s Party (PP) accused Sánchez of covering for the partly state-owned REE, pointing out that its current president was the minister of housing in a Socialist government between 2008 and 2010. Vox’s leader, Santiago Abascal, claimed that the blackout was a result of “climate fanaticism”—a reference to the government’s plan to shut down the country’s five nuclear power stations, which generate about 20% of Spain’s electricity, by 2035. With demand expected to soar over the next decade, Sánchez is under pressure to extend this moratorium; according to a manifesto signed by industry leaders earlier this year, “dismantling this infrastructure prematurely would cause irreparable economic damage.”
The problem with the Spanish right’s accusations is that electricity grids can fail regardless of their energy source. The key issue, it seems, is not the origin of the energy, but the condition of the technology used to convert and distribute it. As one engineer said, “It doesn’t matter where you are getting the energy from; you’ve got to get the engineering right in order to ensure resilient supplies of electricity.”
The technical failures behind the blackout arguably highlight areas where the system needs upgrading—for example, strengthening renewable grids so they can more effectively deal with fluctuations in supply and demand. These are not insurmountable challenges: in 2022, Scotland generated electricity equivalent to 113% of its consumption from renewable sources without any major blackouts.
In providing another opportunity for political point-scoring, the power outage of April 28 is similar to the floods last fall that claimed over 230 lives in Spain, most of them in the northeastern region of Valencia. Then, the Spanish left blasted the PP, which leads the Valencian government, for not taking climate change seriously; now the right is on the offensive, claiming that the left’s “climate fanaticism” is destabilizing the national grid. Both narratives are simplistic; and the likely truth about the blackout—that the five-second generation gap was a freak accident—fits neatly into neither.
