Blackouts are expensive forms of education.
Last year, on 28 April 2025, the power systems of Spain and Portugal failed in seconds. Trains stopped. Mobile networks faltered. Hospitals and data centres fell back on diesel.
For a few hours, two modern European economies were reminded that electricity is not a commodity until the grid has made it one.
One year later, the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) published its final report on the outage.
The Iberian system did not fail just because of renewables. The report shows that it failed because the system around the generation was not designed to manage the stresses of a modern grid.
