By Mark Nayler

On Monday, April 28, just after 12:30 PM local time, Spain and Portugal switched off. A massive power outage left the entire Iberian Peninsula and a small part of southern France without phone lines, electricity, and Internet for more than twelve hours. ATMs and traffic lights shut down, over 300 flights were canceled, hospitals resorted to generators, and 35,000 people had to be rescued from stranded trains.

The blackout is said to have claimed at least three lives: a married couple and their adult son, who reportedly died from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a faulty generator. As the search for causes and culprits begins, political accusations are starting to fly.

Early Monday evening (in a press conference not seen by most Spaniards until hours later), Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s Socialist prime minister, said the cause of the blackout was still unknown, but that he wasn’t ruling out any hypotheses. The following day, as most services in Spain and Portugal returned to normal, Sánchez announced that his government had established an “investigation commission” to examine the role private energy companies may have played. Meanwhile, Portugal’s prime minister, Luis Montenegro, requested an EU enquiry in order to meet the demand for “quick, urgent answers”—although Beatriz Corredor, the president of Spain’s national grid operator Red Eléctrica (REE), announced two days after the blackout: “We know the cause… [B]ut the thing is that there are millions of pieces of information [to analyze].”

REE has confirmed that at 12:33 PM on the 28th, Spain’s electrical grid suffered two disruptions, about 1.5 seconds apart. It recovered from the first, but the second caused a gigantic loss of 15 GW from the system, equivalent to double the combined capacity of the country’s five nuclear power plants, and 60% of the electricity being consumed. Eduardo........

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