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. …