Spain Suffers Massive Blackout Days After Bragging About Hitting 100% Renewable Energy
Historic power outage impacted over 60 million people and is being blamed on a phenomenon called “induced atmospheric vibration.”
It looks like a massive swath of Europe achieved instantaneous Net Zero.
An unprecedented power outage struck large parts of Spain and Portugal, as well as some areas of southern France. The blackout began on April 28, around midnight local time in Spain, disrupting daily life for millions and causing widespread chaos in transportation, communications, and essential services.
Portugal’s grid operator Redes Energéticas Nacionais (REN) said electrical supply was lost across the entire Iberian Peninsula, and in parts of France, shortly after midday. Hours later, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said authorities were still not sure what caused the blackout.
The outage took out lighting and power sockets, and caused subway systems to suddenly fail. In Madrid, traffic piled up on the roads after the lights went out.
“I was driving and suddenly there was no traffic lights … It was a bit of a jungle,” Luis Ibáñez Jiménez told CNN. “I saw a massive bus coming, and I had to accelerate a lot to go past it.”
For those keeping score at home:
April 22nd: Spain brags about hitting 100% renewable power.
April 28th: Spain has the nation's largest blackout in history. pic.twitter.com/S6wsaHEePK
— Will Hild (@WillHild) April 28, 2025
Over 60 million people were impacted by the blackout. Metro systems in Madrid, Barcelona, and Lisbon halted, and Spanish train operator Renfe canceled all departures. Airports, including Madrid-Barajas and Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado, faced significant delays and partial closures, with some flights canceled or grounded.
A bus driver makes a video about the reality of some major areas of Portugal.
This is all of Europe right now. pic.twitter.com/8ShOJZ1FSP
— iamyesyouareno (@iamyesyouareno) April 28, 2025
Though power has been restored in southern France, Spain and Portugal are still reeling from the truly historic outage.
“Trains are not operating and traffic lights are down, causing chaos. Many cities are completely dark,” Al Jazeera’s Step Vaessen said, reporting from Valencia Airport in Spain.
“Authorities have stated that it is the first time in history such a large-scale blackout has occurred,” she added.
Hospitals and emergency services switched to backup generators. Emergency services responded to hundreds of incidents, including elevator rescues and medical emergencies.
Additionally, ATMs and card payment systems failed, leading to long lines at banks and stores, and many shops only accepted cash. Internet and mobile networks were also disrupted in some regions. Over 200 people had to be rescued from stopped elevators.
The scene in a Portuguese supermarket this evening
There is still no electricity in much of Portugal and Spain, with hospitals and supermarkets running on diesel generators. In Spain, Prime Minister Sanchez has declared a state of emergency. pic.twitter.com/HLYLQZgc0m
— Sprinter Observer (@SprinterObserve) April 28, 2025
The leading explanation from Portugal’s grid operator (REN) is that a rare atmospheric phenomenon, described as “induced atmospheric vibration,” triggered the blackout.
REN said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”
In certain weather conditions where the air is warm, damp and windy – the wires can gallop – which is where they visibly swing.
That can cause things to physically break or snap.
The bigger problem is if the ionised air around the cable starts to interact with the cable itself. That changes the frequency inside the wire. Making it different to the rest of the grid.
If those differences become too great, the system shuts itself down for safety reasons.
However, many are skeptical of the phenomenon, as the term was essentially unknown prior to today.
Sounds like horse shit to me. Funny how this term is nowhere to be found on Google other than it being related to today’s massive outages. How convenient.
— Gen. Lee Pisthoff 🇺🇸 (@AllHailKingGila) April 28, 2025
The temperature data doesn’t support this theory.
Climate pansies are blaming the power outages in Spain 🇪🇸 on “extreme temperature variations.” 🌡️
Except, that is BS. 🐂 💩
Temperatures have recently been only slightly above average, and there has been nothing unusual about the day-to-night fluctuations. pic.twitter.com/c8Xjf5yO3p
— Chris Martz (@ChrisMartzWX) April 28, 2025
Of course, other reasonable explanations are possible.
Hundreds of wind turbines in Spain are motionless.
And there is little solar duer to an overcast day. pic.twitter.com/Jd0eogBSjO— True Science PEng, DFP, ADFS, MA, MBA. (@socratesccost) April 28, 2025
Meanwhile, Portuguese officials stress there is no evidence of a cyberattack and that the cause is still under investigation. Power is slowly being restored to the region.
By Monday night, 50% of power had been restored across Spain, according to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. While Portuguese energy provider REN said electricity had been restored to 750,000 customers.
But a state of emergency remained in place, with regions able to request the special status.
Sánchez said the cause of the outage was still being investigated and warned against speculation, while Portuguese Prime Minister Luís Montenegro said there was “no indication” of a cyber attack.
But I must express my gratitude to Spain and Portugal for demonstrating the realities of a fully operational Net Zero system. Hopefully, other regions will heed this lesson.
Congratulations to Portugal and Spain for achieving Net Zero today –
Zero emissions, Zero electricity, Zero explanations! ⚡🌎#NetZero #Blackout pic.twitter.com/JP6k5Q4jcl— Paul Hennessy (@PPHennessy) April 28, 2025
However, it must be noted, this could have been a continent-wide incident.
This is truly bananas: all of Europe appears to have been seconds away a continent-wide blackout.
The grid frequency across continental Europe plunged to 49.85 hertz — just a hair above the red-line collapse threshold.
The normal operating frequency for Europe’s power grid… https://t.co/5qyZLpammm pic.twitter.com/83eCl5B1Ux
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) April 28, 2025
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Comments
I thought it meant Spain didn’t pay their electric bill.
“Induced atmospheric vibration”?
You mean, wind?
No. A lot of it is thermal phenomena causing local air movement to sway the lines. Not “wind” in the generally accepted sense of the term.
guess those cow farts are overly active
That’s funny…I was under the impression that high-voltage transmission lines are almost all direct current (DC), and that it’s stepped down to alternating current (AC) for distribution and further reduction in voltage (in AC transformers) for delivery. In Europe homes mostly run on 220 VAC/50 Hz, while here in the US it’s mostly 230 VAC (and 115 VAC at your outlets) at 60 Hz.
It’s literally impossible to have a frequency variation in a DC power line. Now a voltage drop due to lack of generation will cause a system-wide failure, and at the delivery end could cause a loss of frequency stability as shown in the graph.
They’re lying.
See my below comment that was meant as a reply to you. Thank you.
NotCoach, please refer to the somewhat lengthy article in Wiki about DC long-distance transmission lines:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
It includes things like this (second paragraph):
“HVDC lines are commonly used for long-distance power transmission, since they require fewer conductors and incur less power loss than equivalent AC lines. HVDC also allows power transmission between AC transmission systems that are not synchronized.”
Or this:
“A long-distance, point-to-point HVDC transmission scheme generally has lower overall investment cost and lower losses than an equivalent AC transmission scheme. Although HVDC conversion equipment at the terminal stations is costly, the total DC transmission-line costs over long distances are lower than for an AC line of the same distance.”
And this:
“Depending on voltage level and construction details, HVDC transmission losses are quoted at 3.5% per 1,000 km (620 mi), about 50% less than AC (6.7%) lines at the same voltage.”
One of the main reasons it is used over long-distance, high-voltage transmission is the lower cost and lower inherent losses than high-voltage AC. It is completely acknowledged that there is an additional cost at the end of the line where it needs very expensive equipment to rectify it to alternating current for easy step-down in voltage at various places (sub-stations, end-of-line transformers, etc) but it is widely used in both the US and Europe for long-distance transmission.
It also is better for inter-connecting otherwise unrelated power grids since there is no change in phase angle (DC doesn’t have one) or loss of frequency stability.
See this for example:
“Because HVDC allows power transmission between unsynchronized AC distribution systems, it can help increase system stability, by preventing cascading failures from propagating from one part of a wider power transmission grid to another. Changes in load that would cause portions of an AC network to become unsynchronized and to separate, would not similarly affect a DC link, and the power flow through the DC link would tend to stabilize the AC network. The magnitude and direction of power flow through a DC link can be directly controlled and changed as needed to support the AC networks at either end of the DC link.”
Lock-in resonance caused by wind-produced vortex shedding is a well-known and easily avoided phenomenon. In power lines it’s usually evidenced by “galloping” of the lines in a cross-wind or following-wind, and you will often see vortex-shedding devices, or sometimes simply weights attached to very long stretches of lines over river crossings. Think “Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse”, except for power lines.
Summary: They’re lying.
You are cherry picking. While in the last 50 years this may have become practical for long distance transmission the reality is that our grid is AC from start to finish in the vast majority of places. These DC transmission systems are used primarily in remote locations. Just about every DC transmission system in Europe is an undersea system as shown on a map in the Wiki you linked. And I see only one DC transmission line on the map for Spain, and it isn’t even built yet.
Perhaps you should have looked at the map on the Wiki page.
Correction: I confused the colors. Red is in service, green under construction. One HVDC line in Spain that transmit between Spain and France.
My understanding is DC voltage is constant. It has no frequency, and isn’t used for transmission.
It actually IS used for transmission when – after calculations are done – it is decided that the losses of transmitting DC are less than what is lost in inductive reactions and other nasties one gets with AC.
Still rare overall. Typically used in hard to reach places or remote locations.
DC power lines are good for about 2 miles then it needs to be regenerated. Tesla with Westinghouse proved that AC covered more area over Edison’s DC power lines
Meanwhile, Trump (on advice from the two TN senators) fired TVA climate cultist in charge and the interim is applying for construction permits for a new nuclear power plant here in the free state of Tennessee.
You’re just volunteering to provide cheap power to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Illinois.
These days, I think the rain in Spain falls mainly on the woke.
The electricity in Spain is absent on the plain (and everywhere else).
Thanks Spain for proving what everyone with at least 1/10th a brain has been saying for years.
Your impression is wrong. Utilities produce and transmit power in AC to save money because you can transform AC (you can’t directly transform DC). By using AC you can transmit over long distances at high voltage and transform down to usable voltages locally.
We can thank Tesla (the guy) for AC. Edison wanted DC but DC has huge penalties with power loss and not at all practical for energy distribution .
(the guy) Nikola
DC’s drawback: it is harder to step voltages up for transmission, AC voltage is easy to increase or decrease with a transformer, nothing but copper and iron. DC voltage changes were historically more difficult, nowadays we have solid state electronics to handle it all around us. However, the stuff to handle transmission level voltages and current is still very specialized.
As part of the transmission wars, Edison had the first “electric chair” built for executing condemned prisoners and delivered it for free to his local penitentiary. He specifically built it to use AC, to demonize his competitors. Mean Girl Edison went even further, suggesting that the authorities officially announce that each prisoner was being “Westinghoused” instead of “electrocuted.” Unfortunately, Edison was a much better self-promoter than he was a QC engineer. When the chair was used, it cooked the screaming prisoner alive but entirely failed to kill him. It soon came to light that AC was entirely unsuitable for electrocutions, whereas Edison’s own DC snuffed ’em like gangbusters.
(This is the sort of cocktail party fodder you take away from a minor in History of Technology.)
DC transmission lines are occasionally used as transmission of DC power is a bit more efficient than AC, but the power and distance both need to be sufficiently large to justify the costs and losses associated with rectifying AC to DC and then re-inverting it to AC at the destination. There is a large DC transmission line from the coal rich region near Bismarck North Dakota to the energy hungry region near Minneapolis Minnesota.
It’s only relatively recently that DC-to-DC transformers (“converters”) became a thing, much less consumer-affordable ones. Today you can purchase for under $100 a 12VDC-to-24VDC converter for (for example) running your 24V CPAP machine while you’re camping offgrid in your 12V RV.
“Rare atmospheric phenomenon” is to this blackout what “Wuhan wet market” was to Covid.
The most likely scenario here is that the renewable grid was unable to respond quickly enough to frequency changes. Conventional grids respond much more rapidly to frequency and demand fluctuations.
And the reason for that is the wonderful energy density of fossil fuels (and even nukes) that lets you put a little bit more or less energy into the system in a controlled fashion.
Que the photo of the mentality challenged Greta smiling like a slow Mona Lisa!?! Wise beyond her years.
That’s a common look for people with her condition.
Sometimes drool is involved.
The video shown below is in plain English and explains what happened. Your need old fashion power plants to prevent future blackouts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed8JLg92zGw
Fantastic youtube channel.
So TL;DR is that the inertia of the heavy-metal old-school generating facilities imposes a moderating influence on sudden surges and sags in demand that solid-state regulators can’t supply.
It sounds a lot like the audiophile lore that tube amps are less harsh than solid state amps.
All of the deaths, injuries and economic devastation/impoverishment/disruption created by leftist/Dhimmi-crat apparatchiks’ manifestly idiotic and predictably unfeasible “green” energy/”climate change” schemes and diktats should be considered to be the product of criminal negligence, and, prosecuted as such, in Europe and in the U.S.
“Induced atmospheric vibration”😂
Neuralyzer technology has a ways to go.
There is no resilience in a “green” energy system. You can’t bring more solar panels or wind machines onboard when generation lags behind demand.
The idea is that you should have a consistently high enough level of energy production to store it in batteries that can then pick up the load for surge demands or drop-offs of production. The problem being that battery energy density and ability to output large quantities quickly is nowhere near where it needs to be for that to work. Also, you can only store excess – if you’re not producing enough over demand consistently, then you’ve got nothing to store.
And that is what makes the system inelastic. The theory is never the reality.
As soon as Spain renews their grid then energy will flow. That’s the real definition of renewable ….
the energy must flow!!
A fragile grid seems like a bad idea. I suggest that in periods of low/no wind and low/no solar that jurisdictions which insist on these ‘renewable’ but unreliable methods of electricity generation be isolated. That allows the rest of us to function while giving the members of the wokiesta climate cult the opportunity to contemplate the depth of their commitment to wind and solar.
Looks like they’re getting to enjoy the benefits of 100% renewable (read unreliable) power.
If they just prayed better to the God of Power, this wouldn’t be happening.
Someone in Portugal is an unbeliever! We must find him!