TheMarketForIdeas

On 28 April 2025, a power outage affected the entire Iberian Peninsula and border areas of France, as well as Andorra. Reports of outages in other countries turned out to be false or unrelated to the events in Spain and Portugal. The power outage affected all of the mainland parts of the two countries. The islands were not affected, as they had independent power grids. By the next day, power had been restored in almost all of the affected areas. Damage was estimated at 4.5 billion euros, but even more important in the long term is the erosion of confidence in the reliability of European critical infrastructure. Politically, there could be major consequences, including increased risks of populism, since the European Union has in recent years been moving strongly (and often self-defeatingly) towards decarbonizing energy production, electrifying important areas of the economy such as transport, and increasing the share of renewable energy in the European mix, under the auspices of the dual digital and green transitions (and, ironically, the Spanish Presidency of the EU Council was talking about the triple transition, including the social one). While it is too early to have definitive answers about the root causes of the incident, the blackout was a shock to Europe and perhaps a wake-up call about the weaknesses of a strongly ideological and political approach to pragmatic and technical realities.

Anatomy of a crisis

The sudden loss of significant electricity generation capacity triggered fluctuations in the frequency and voltage of the grid. This was followed by an automatic cascading disconnection of various critical power plants and transformer stations, including the connection to France, as part of a successful self-preservation effort. On April 23^rd, just days before the crisis, Spain had announced that its total renewable energy generation was sufficient to cover all of its national consumption on that day. In fact, it was a kind of green marketing, because Spain’s energy mix already included 10% nuclear and 10% hydrocarbons, and the excess renewables production was exported. It could only be said in accounting terms that Spain covered its consumption, not in engineering terms, because the absence of European energy storage capacity (estimated at a few tens of seconds of the total daily consumption requirement) means that almost all electricity must be consumed at the time of production, regardless of the actual consumption of national consumers, hence the need to export the excess to another European region currently in deficit.

The irony of this incident is that it was, in fact, the product of the proper functioning of the mechanisms ensuring the viability of the electrical infrastructure. Energy is not lost, but transformed, and everyone who has held a hot phone to their ear knows that the easiest transformation is into heat. The cascading disconnection of the Iberian electrical systems and on the French border saved elements of physical infrastructure from the risk of total destruction, which would have required months or even years of remediation. In this case, a check of the infrastructure for damage and then its reconnection to restart the electrical grid could be carried out in less than a day. The hidden problem is that stocks of transformers and other components are also affected by economic incentives to reduce reserves, such as stocks of munitions before the war in Ukraine or stocks of medical equipment, precursor substances for drugs and vaccines or personal protective equipment before the Covid-19 pandemic. In the context of helping Ukraine by delivering equipment to quickly repair the power grid affected by Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure, it is very possible that Europe (and the US, for that matter) does not actually have the capacity to quickly remedy a destructive incident on a national or European scale. And such incidents do not happen only as a result of the complexity of the grid, but can also be the product of a particularly powerful solar storm (the cases reported in Quebec in 1989 and Sweden in 2003), but also of a deliberate electromagnetic pulse attack for which we keep receiving warnings lately.

Was green to blame?

At first glance, it seems so. It is certainly to blame for the increasing instability of power grids. On the one hand, intermittent energy sources require an increasingly delicate ballet to maintain continuous electricity supply by keeping backup generation infrastructure on standby (necessarily based on fast-start turbines using fossil fuels, especially natural gas, in the absence of significant energy storage capacities through batteries or pumped storage). On the other hand, we have the growing trend of prosumers. If the green energy sector had been limited, like thermal, hydroelectric or nuclear power plants, to a relatively small number of large players, management would have been easier. The growing number of people with small production capacities feeding the grid and the trend of industrial areas putting solar panels and micro wind farms on warehouse roofs have generated a phenomenal complexity of electrical systems. There is already talk of artificial intelligence as a tool for managing complex continentally unified electricity networks, given that the coordination of the networks already requires signals from orbital atomic clocks in global navigation satellite systems like GPS. These systems are vulnerable to hybrid cyber, electromagnetic spectrum or even physical attack campaigns – see the Space Threat Assessment Report 2025 from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC – in addition to the natural risks of the hostile environment in which they operate. In parallel, there has been a laxity in investment in reserve capacity on the grounds that European imports can cover the deficit if necessary, but investment in cross-border high-voltage lines has also stagnated. In particular, in the case of this incident, the inadequacy of Spain's connections with France was revealed, which may have managed to prevent this incident. We have a “perfect storm” of factors that have increased the systemic risks of European energy, as if there were not enough problems already. Furthermore, it should be noted that intermittent renewable energy sources (i.e. solar and wind, not hydro) do not contribute to grid stability in the form of operating frequency, which is ensured by the natural operating frequency of steam turbines (thermal, geothermal or nuclear power plants) or water (hydropower plants). It is quite possible that the decline below a certain level of contributors to grid stability will make Iberian-type incidents more frequent.

Political consequences

The blackout provides ammunition for European dissidents from the pro-green, pro-decarbonization and anti-nuclear (recently weakened) ideology that has dominated European discourse for almost two decades. Even energy experts, supporters of the green transition, such as Thierry Bros from SciencePo, have been critical of the impetuosity of the transition to the detriment of energy security and security of supply. Even the goal of decarbonization was undermined, as seen in post-Energiewende Germany in 2011, when the decision to abandon nuclear power led to the reopening of coal-fired power plants to stabilize the grid in the context of new North Sea wind projects waiting to be connected. For the Spanish government, the situation is all the more embarrassing as it had proudly announced on April 23 that energy production from renewable sources was enough to cover all of the country's daily consumption (a political lie as explained above) and populist parties such as Vox have monopolized the area of ​​criticism of the green transition.

There are too many vested interests in green energy to see a reversal (no matter how much Trump demands the dismantling of offshore wind farms), but ideally there should be a greater focus on grid resilience, transparency about the costs of maintaining backup capacity for intermittent energy sources, and a reassessment of the legacy of the Green parties in Europe, especially in Germany. The irony is that the Green ideologies of a century ago were on the conservative side of the political spectrum, but the natural electorate has been alienated by elitist Green parties that have focused on global issues to the detriment of viable arguments among the “deplorables” about the destruction of the local natural environment. The various interests must be reconciled somehow, and the insistence on grid resilience can be the moderating factor in a political dispute that has taken on ideological valences. In this sense, greater investments in nuclear energy (such as those in Romania and Poland), better sharing of the costs of grid stabilization, and recognition of the role of lower-emission fossil fuels (natural gas, synthetic fuels) over a much longer-term transition period than Europe's hyper-optimistic 2030 and 2050 are needed. Even Elon Musk has tried to articulate a compromise between the climate-change-sceptical American right that he allied himself with when he joined Trump's coalition and his own economic vision and interest in solar energy and the electrification of transport.

Resilience, resilience, resilience

The political question left on the table is how much good can come from the unilateral decarbonization by the European Union, which is responsible for 4% of global carbon emissions, compared to the US (which has very high domestic emission reduction trends), China and India (both of which have exemptions under the Paris Agreement). The example of Romania in the early 1990s shows us that the easiest way to halve emissions is to close down industry and become poor, but no politician has the courage to present such a trade-off to an electorate that has been promised green virtue without personal financial costs (hidden in inflation, electricity prices and the cost of subsidies) or declines in living standards. The blackout in the Iberian Peninsula is an exclamation mark on an already secular trend of increasing frequency and severity of blackouts at European level. The European Energy Union can deliver value to Europeans only if it is also a source of resilience.

I would highlight here the opportunity for assessing critically an incipient European idea that would further aggravate Europe’s energy supply risks – if, in the context of hydrocarbon dependence on geopolitically complex actors and regions outside Europe, we decided to also outsource electricity production for financial or geostrategic reasons. Discussions on the positioning of massive solar power projects in North and Sub-Saharan Africa, the planned (and sabotage-vulnerable) underwater power interconnections between Greece and Egypt, the ELMED between Italy and Tunisia, the existing ones between Spain and Morocco, but also those planned in the Black Sea region must be properly sized and analysed from the perspective of long-term European resilience.

We also need to look critically at plans for the electrification of industry and transport at European level. The financial scale of the blackout in Iberia and the impact in terms of human lives and business continuity would have been much greater if the transport of goods and people had been 100% dependent on the unified electricity grid. What remains undiscussed in the European public sphere is the impact on defense, in the context of the dependence of European ministries of defense on the civilian electricity infrastructure for a large part of their consumption (which is also why Russia attacked Ukraine's civilian energy infrastructure, in addition to the coercive aspect on the population). Europe has neither the financial resources nor the mentality necessary to adapt to a future of unreliable electricity networks as underdeveloped or developing countries such as India have done, where all companies, hospitals and other entities above a certain level have their own backup diesel generators. In this context, only a political commitment doubled by smart policies and concrete actions can ensure business continuity and quality of life in the European Union. Otherwise, the dream of the convergence of the developing world with the developed one will be realized through the decline of the latter.

Photo source: PxHere.com.