One year after Spain’s blackout, its shift to renewables and grid evolution power on

One year ago today, all of Spain, and much of Portugal, suffered through a blackout of unprecedented scale and duration. In mere seconds, a cascading sequence of events burst through the grid and created Europe’s first “system black” event in recent memory. Traffic signals failed, mobile networks stopped working entirely, petrol stations could not pump fuel and supermarkets couldn’t process payments. Madrid’s metro came to a halt and people had to be pulled out of carriages. “People were stunned because this had never happened in Spain ,” Carlos Condori, a 19-year-old construction sector worker, told AFP at the time. “There’s no [phone] coverage, I can’t call my family, my parents, nothing: I can’t even go to work.” Power was mostly restored in the days after, but the political debate – domestic and global – began just hours after the blackout occurred. Spain’s grid collapsed when solar power generation was high, triggering intense discussions around Spain’s transition away from fossil fuelled power and, controversially, nuclear. The media published headlines such as “Renewable energy triggered Spain’s blackouts”, “Spain at risk of fresh net zero blackouts” and “Spain power cut caused by solar farm failures”. Granada on 28 April 2025, when much of Spain and Portugal lost power. …