Today, as I was sipping my morning coffee and planning a quick check on my solar house projects, the news broke: a massive blackout swept across Spain and Portugal. Airports closed, metros stopped mid-tunnel, and-most importantly for the local butchers and ice-cream shops-fridges and freezers went dark. It’s the kind of event that makes you realize just how much we all rely on electricity and how we treat it for granted.
The outage, which struck late morning, was sudden and widespread. In Portugal, it was nationwide; in Spain, even Madrid’s Barajas airport and major hospitals lost power. The cause? Still under investigation. Some point to a fire in southern France that damaged a high-voltage line; others haven’t ruled out a cyberattack. The European grid is a complex beast-one hiccup, and the dominoes fall fast.
I couldn’t help but think of my own adventures with backup power, i need to say that guys thinking im crazy for having 10kWh BESS in a flat are oddly silent today. For the folks in Madrid, the real test was keeping the meat cold and the ice-cream from melting. For hospitals, it was about keeping the lights on in operating rooms, with generators running on borrowed time. It’s important to understand the grid as multifaceted, complex live organism – electricity powers pumps, pumps deliver water. Without electricity were loosing also waste management.
By afternoon, power was trickling back, but not everywhere. The grid operators were working overtime, shuffling switches and restoring connections. It’s a stark reminder: our energy systems are both robust and fragile, and a single fault-be it fire, cyberattack, or just bad luck-can ripple across borders.
If you’re as fascinated by these grid puzzles as I am, you might want to dig deeper into Virtual Power Plants and how we can build more resilient systems. For now, though, I’m off to check the batteries in the closet. Just in case.
Sources
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal-and-parts-of-france-hit-by-massive-power-outage
https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/power-outages-blackout-spain-portugal-04-28-25/index.html
Stay prepared!
