On April 28 last year, a massive blackout plunged Spain and Portugal into darkness for over twelve hours. Flights were canceled, thousands of people were stranded on trains, and there were at least eight related deaths. The Spanish right seized on this freak event to attack what it called the Socialist-led government’s “climate fanaticism”—but although renewable energy was generating about 70% of Spain’s power at the time, an in-depth investigation has found that it wasn’t the cause.

Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez, it seems, was right in saying, “Those who link this incident to the lack of nuclear energy are either lying or revealing their ignorance,” although he can’t have had sufficient evidence for this when he said it. The Spanish premier, however, may still have to rethink his position on nuclear power, as the rest of Europe shifts its energy policy in reaction to a fraught global situation. Sánchez’s crowd-pleasing €5 billion emergency package, designed to reduce the economic impact on Spaniards of events in the Middle East, is a short-term fix for what could be a long-term problem.

The final report on Spain and Portugal’s 2025 blackout was released on March 20 by the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E). Its panel of 49 experts concluded that 17 “interacting factors” caused the power outage, including “oscillations, gaps in voltage and power control [and] rapid output reproductions and generation disconnections.” They illustrate this “perfect storm” of inter-connected events with a diagram that resembles the family tree of an ancient dynasty.

According to ENTSO-E, no single cause can be blamed for last April’s blackout. Rooftop solar panels were found to have tripped early, and some might have to be re-fitted—but that’s hardly enough to justify the Spanish........

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