Blackout in Spain

Spain's power grid ran entirely on renewable energy for the first time on April 16, 2025, with wind, solar and hydro meeting all peninsular electricity demand during a weekday.

- BOO CHANCO

Then last Monday, at 12:35 p.m., less than two weeks after that milestone event, the lights went out across Spain and Portugal for 18 hours.

It was a mess. In the space of a few seconds, 15 gigawatts of energy suddenly dropped from Spain's supply, equivalent to 60 percent of the electricity being consumed at the time — and the entire Spanish grid collapsed.

Eduardo Prieto, the director of services for the grid operator Red Eléctrica, told CNN that the grid recovered after that first shock. But a second disconnection, one and a half seconds later, caused "a degradation of operating variables" of the system, leading to a "massive generation disconnection" and "disconnection of the connection lines with France."

Michael Shellenberger, a journalist and a climate and environmental activist, wrote that "it was one of the largest peacetime blackouts Europe has ever seen. It was not an unforeseeable event. It was the exact failure that many of us have been, repeatedly, warning lawmakers about for years — warnings that Europe's political leaders systematically chose to ignore."

There has been no official determination of what caused the massive power failure. But The New York Times reports the possibility of how Spain's success in renewable energy may have left it vulnerable. The NYT reports that the widespread blackout raises questions about the resilience of the electric power infrastructure in the Iberian Peninsula — and, to an extent, the rest of Europe.

Spain's power company, Red Eléctrica, provided data showing that more than 75 percent of the electricity Spain was using at the time of the outage came from renewable sources.