07 May 2025 – When something happens beyond our control, we react to the circumstances and we also try, maybe later, to make sense of it. On 28 April 2025, Monday, for the first time in history, Spain suffered a massive electricity outage, which also affected Portugal. Power was reduced to zero for several hours. For most of the country, the blackout lasted around 10 to 12 hours, long enough to experience the untypical.
Of course, we realised in practice how much we depend on electricity. I found out I cannot heat food or water without electricity; there is no gas stove at home. And that day, no telephone, no internet, no television either. The big and invading noise of cyberspace, reduced to silence. There was a peculiar note: the weather was splendid. A sunny and warm day, displaying the beauty of nature flourishing. Was she smiling, or maybe laughing at us?
In the absence of high tech, plain old things were back. Face-to-face conversations were the only way to communicate. Radios powered by batteries were the only way to get information. Cash was again the means to pay, in the few shops or restaurants still open. Of course, the whole thing was a big mess, especially for those trapped in subways and trains (233 of them stopped in the middle of nowhere) and for those who had no way to go home but on foot, often for several hours across places unwelcoming to pedestrians. But interestingly, the mess was not chaos. People reacted in general calmly, showing care for others. Parents went to take their kids from schools, the elders, disabled and most vulnerable received extra attention. Even without traffic lights, cars respected pedestrians! Some citizens even replaced the traffic police which was busy elsewhere. No relevant security issues, no looting, no riots.
As in other crises, such as the terrorist attacks in 2004, the Covid-19 pandemic, or the floods in Valencia in October 2024, the role of public services, and particularly emergency, healthcare and security, was essential to deal with the situation and was massively perceived as such. Spain is largely suspicious of its political institutions, not a real surprise after four decades of dictatorship in the 20th century and five centuries of Holy Inquisition. But, across the ideological spectrum we trust our public services, especially the humble servants taking care of us, as well as the scientists, physicians and educators.
In spite of polarisation, we were not drowned in fake news, maybe because the ideal medium was not available anyway? We don’t know yet what caused the blackout and the hypothesis of a cyber-attack came out (by Israelis or Russians?), but not obsessively. Moreover, we understand these days that the electricity system is as powerful as it is delicate. The national oversight and network management is in the hands of Red Eléctrica de España (REE), a now private company with a 20% share of the State and still a spirit of public service. It did very well in getting the system fully recovered less than a day after the outage.
Interestingly, renewables (hydro, solar, wind) already dominate the production of electricity in Spain: their share was 57% in 2024, and they sometimes go up to 100%. On 28 April, they provided 70%. With the success came new challenges, some of them not properly addressed. And hasty assessments are used now by some to claim that we have too much renewable supply and we should vindicate nuclear energy for the sake of stability, while it is planned to phase out completely by 2035.
Things are a bit more complicated. While on one hand the electricity generated is always the same, the sources of energy have different attributes of inertia, intermittency, flexibility and resilience, and hence they affect the network behaviour differently. On 28 April, the mix was a lot of solar and wind energy, a bit of nuclear, a little hydro and no gas and that was probably not ideal (still under investigation) to avoid the instabilities that made the network shut down.
But the composition of the production mix is mostly conditioned by a price-based market, where private electricity producers offer their supply. This brings with it a trick: because of the influence of a few big players who made an early and too selfish bet on renewables, these were massively introduced, but without the necessary investments (basically in converters and storage) to improve their stability characteristics.
Now, it appears that a price-driven market biased by oligopolies cannot determine the optimal energy mix providing both cheap supply and stability, since the sources are not fully comparable. Instead of “silver bullets” (private markets providing for everything; one source of energy as THE solution), the delicate nature of the electricity system will require a subtle and evolving mix of responses, where the common good needs to play a prominent role.
In passing, we also learned that depending on others is not always bad. Renewables offer the possibility of independence, even at the smallest scale. At the same time the prompt recovery of the system was facilitated by electricity imports not only from France but from Morocco, a country that we tend to ignore, while it is a big part of our present, and even more of our future.
All in all, what did this experience mean to me? First, I felt that the sense of the collective is essential and compared to other supposedly “developed” countries, Spain has not lost it. With no artifacts to hide behind, a re-humanising disposition to help others, also meaning respect for all members of the community, is still the dominant reaction at moments of crisis. The appreciation of what we have and do in common, and hence of public services, is still with us. Isn’t that the most relevant?
Second, the paradigm shift we (rightly) promote at The Club of Rome might not be a brutal disruption after all but rather be conveyed by a fabric of subtlety and attention to the details. When circumstances are propitious, details make a big difference, as this is how bifurcations of complex systems work. Let us think which crucial details could make us, in moments of collapse when the options of selfishness and solidarity become existential, choose to feel like brothers and sisters, born of the same Mother Earth.
The experience of the blackout, even for a few hours, brought me something else. My friends from South Africa and Bangladesh said: “Welcome to our world!”. At our Annual Conference in Costa Rica in 2022 I realised that people having experienced collapse might be the vanguard of humanity in our process of emergence towards ecological civilisations. We (the Westerners) behave as if we were living in superior states of civilisation, and to our patronising self-contentment, we like thinking that we help Most of the World to climb to our level. What if, in our possibly futile attempt at preventing our own collapse, we had all to learn from them? And what if there is not an “us” and “them” in the end? How far is any of us from collapse anyway? How far back do you have to look into your own family to realise that you are an offspring of refugees?
The Universe is always speaking to us, but are we listening? Aware of the list of collapses that have affected my life recently, the Covid-19 pandemic for sure, but also distant and yet close wars, floods not far, and now this blackout, one more question came out: should we not slow down? Aren’t we going faster and faster to nowhere? When the electricity returned, I was obviously relieved. A couple of days later, when I recovered full access to the internet and television, I also felt relieved. Was that a wise feeling or the sign of a sneaky addiction I should pay attention to?
