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After the Darkness: How Iberia Rebooted Its Grid
What the April 2025 blackout reveals about modern black start, grid resilience, and the road to renewables
On April 28, 2025, the Iberian Peninsula experienced a significant and sudden blackout, plunging large portions of Spain and Portugal into darkness and disrupting critical infrastructure for millions of people. The outage occurred at around midday, severing approximately 60% of the region’s electricity supply in seconds. The initial cause remains under thorough investigation, with complexities involving interconnected transmission systems, diverse generation sources including nuclear, renewable, gas, and remaining coal capacity, and operational factors that authorities have yet to fully unpack.
Like many people engaged in the global energy transformation, as soon as I heard the news I knew that the usual suspects — delayers and nuclear advocates especially — would be blaming renewables despite the lack of any evidence that they contributed. And lo, it has come to pass. My ‘favorite’ was the people who blamed the lack of nuclear in Spain despite there being 4 GW of operating nuclear on the grid that tripped off due to the blackout. However, while causation remains uncertain and speculative at this stage, the technical process used to restore power — known as a…
