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Spain’s Short Blanket: A Blackout, a Blame Game, and a Broken System
Spain skipped the hard work of adapting its grid to renewables — then pointed fingers at everything but its own shortcuts
Five seconds.
That’s to turn Europe’s sunniest energy success story into a dystopian dress rehearsal.
On the unremarkable of April 28, over across Spain, Portugal, and went dark — instantly. Airports grounded. . Traffic lights died mid-blink. And cell towers went silent. Within minutes, humming cities turned chaotic and blind. And, more than ever, powerless. Spain declared a . Thirty thousand police were deployed. But you could already see it: the skin of digital order peeled back in real time to reveal a system that only works when everything else does.
By nightfall, just was back, but a day after the largest blackout in living memory, 99% of the had been and thanks to swift action by grid operators.
We still don’t have the full story yet. What we do know is that three catastrophic consecutive failures beginning in — a region stacked with solar farms…