# And suddenly, the lights went out. In all of Spain and Portugal
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
**Created:** [April 28, 2025, 3:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611 "2025-04-28T15:33:39Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 3:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/1 "2025-04-28T15:33:39Z")
They do not know why, not yet. Or they are not telling. And it will take hours until service is restored. Here is a live feed (no idea how they are feeding it, with no light):
> **[Spain and Portugal power outage live: no signs of cyber-attack, says EU, amid...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/apr/28/ukraine-russia-zelenskyy-putin-trump-crimea-germany-europe-news-live-updates)**
>
> European Council president rules out cyber-attack as Portugal and Spain both offer cautious hopes power can soon be restored
Here something more permanent, I guess:
> **[Mega power outage in Spain and Portugal threatens to last 10 more hours](https://www.politico.eu/article/huge-blackouts-cripple-power-supply-in-spain-and-portugal/)**
>
> Top official says there’s currently no indication of a cyberattack, as grid operator works to restore power.
Communications, transport, traffic, everything is chaos. It started suddenly, shortly after 12:30, during the daytime. People were at work, most don’t know how to get back home. Hospitals have emergency power units, most lifts do not. Just as an example: so many things become irreparably damaged when forced to stop for too long.
And I can’t find a better place to put this than MPSIMS. Hoping it does not become Politics and Sabotage!
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### Author:  [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/2 "2025-04-28T15:34:57Z")
Should I tag this as #breaking-news, or do you want asides, opinions and non-factual commentary?
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### Author:  [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/3 "2025-04-28T15:37:18Z")
I don’t mind asides, and the situation is fluid, no need to be too restrictive. There may be a lot of tangential aspects to develop.
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### Author:  [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/4 "2025-04-28T15:39:43Z")
I hope this was just some power company stupidity and not an attack. I’m surprised the two Iberian countries share a grid. I guess that is an EU thing?
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### Author:  [@Dung\_Beetle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dung_Beetle)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 3:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/5 "2025-04-28T15:42:18Z")
Wow. I hope you will be safe.
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### Author:  [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/6 "2025-04-28T15:44:56Z")
What is surprising about sharing a grid as neighbours? Germany buys and sells electricity to and from France, Denmark, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Swizzerland… They all are synchronized to the same frequency (50 Hz, if I remember right) and the grid goes beyond the EU.
Looked up the European Power Grid and got this:
> **[Continental Europe Synchronous Area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous_Area)**
>
> The Continental Europe Synchronous Area (CESA), formerly known as the UCTE grid, is one of the largest synchronous electrical grids in the world, primarily operating in Europe. It is interconnected as a single phase-locked 50 Hz mains frequency electricity grid that supplies over 400 million customers in 32 countries, including most of the European Union. In 2009, 667 GW of production capacity was connected to the grid, providing approximately 80 GW of operating reserve margin. The transmissio
Don’t you share the grid between States in the USA? How do you import electricity from Canada otherwise?
(see: breaking news is too narrow for this 😉 )
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### Author:  [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/7 "2025-04-28T15:46:01Z")
I am in Germany, don’t worry about me. This seems contained to the Iberian Peninsula. But they have some hard hours ahead.
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### Author:  [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/8 "2025-04-28T15:49:47Z")
> [@Pardel-Lux](#):
>
> (see: breaking news is too narrow for this 😉 )
I held off on my comments until I knew you didn’t want the #breaking-news tag.
And you’re correct, we have 3 grids\* and somehow get power from Canada also.
\* The 3 grids are East, West and Texas. Though that is a simplification and it is really more complicated: [North American power transmission grid - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmission_grid)
* * *
* * *
[From the BBC](https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c9wpq8xrvd9t):
> Spain’s nuclear reactors are in “safe condition” despite the country’s power outages, Spain’s nuclear safety council says.
>
> The reactors automatically stopped working after the outage but emergency generators kicked in.
>
> The shutdown was in line with the way in which Spain’s power plants are designed to respond to an unexpected power outage, the council adds.
> Grid operator says there will be ‘gradual’ recovery of supply
> The statement adds that work is under way to “gradually” recover electricity throughout the Iberian peninsular.
> Voltage has already been recovered in some areas - and consumers will start to see supply returning, it says.
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### Author:  [@Dung\_Beetle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dung_Beetle)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/9 "2025-04-28T15:50:16Z")
I probably should have known that! Well, I hope everyone affected will be safe then. 🙂
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### Author:  [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/10 "2025-04-28T16:11:36Z")
> [@Pardel-Lux](#):
>
> Don’t you share the grid between States in the USA? How do you import electricity from Canada otherwise?
Hoo-boy…you are going to open a real can of worms with that question, the answer to which is sort-of, sometimes, in a very complicated and kind of _ad hoc_ manner. Except for (most of) Texas, of course:
> **[North American power transmission grid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmission_grid#/media/File:NERC-map-en.svg)**
>
> The electrical power grid that powers Northern America is not a single grid, but is instead divided into multiple wide area synchronous grids. The Eastern Interconnection and the Western Interconnection are the largest. Three other regions include the Texas Interconnection, the Quebec Interconnection, and the Alaska Interconnection. Each region delivers power at a nominal 60 Hz frequency.
> The regions are not usually directly connected or synchronized to each other, but there exist some HVDC i...
Stranger
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### Author:  [@susan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/susan)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/11 "2025-04-28T16:23:11Z")
Part of France as well.
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### Author:  [@Jeff\_Lichtman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jeff_Lichtman)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/12 "2025-04-28T16:24:49Z")
Is there a map of the outage? None of the articles I’ve looked at so far show the boundaries.
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### Author:  [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/13 "2025-04-28T16:34:48Z")
French Basque country _briefly_ went dark. That’s the part of France bordering Spain.
From the sound of it most if not all of Spain.
A good chunk of Portugal.
So… pretty much the land area Spain and Portugal occupy.
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### Author:  [@PastTense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PastTense)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/14 "2025-04-28T16:34:51Z")
There have been these types of major cascading failures before; two which come to mind are the:
> **[Northeast blackout of 1965](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_1965)**
>
> The northeast blackout of 1965 was a significant disruption in the supply of electricity on Tuesday, November 9, 1965, affecting parts of Ontario in Canada and Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont in the United States. Over 30 million people and 80,000 square miles (207,000 km2), and a population density of 144.9 inhabitants/km2 were left without electricity for up to 13 hours.
> The cause of the failure was ...
> **[Northeast blackout of 2003](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003)**
>
> The Northeast blackout of 2003 was a widespread power outage throughout parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, and most parts of the Canadian province of Ontario on Thursday, August 14, 2003, beginning just after 4:10 p.m. EDT.
> Most places restored power by midnight (within 7 hours), some as early as 6 p.m. on August 14 (within 2 hours), while the New York City Subway resumed limited services around 8 p.m. Full power was restored to New York City and parts of Toronto on August...
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### Author:  [@engineer\_comp\_geek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/engineer_comp_geek)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/15 "2025-04-28T16:50:26Z")
> [@Pardel-Lux](#):
>
> Don’t you share the grid between States in the USA? How do you import electricity from Canada otherwise?
The U.S. is physically too large for a single grid. History and politics also factor into it. But basically, North America has two main grids (eastern and western) which are shared between the U.S. and Canada, and three smaller grids, Alaska, Texas, and Quebec. Texas maintains a separate grid because they don’t want to be subject to U.S. Federal regulations and can retain control over their power grid at the state level.
The Northeast and Southwest U.S. are somewhat overloaded, and therefore have a greater risk of a cascade failure, especially in the summer when the electrical load is greatest (due to everyone running their air conditioners).
Here is how a cascade failure works. Imagine that you have 4 power companies, A, B, C, and D. All four of these tie their systems together into one big grid. C can’t produce enough power for all of their customers, so they buy power from D. Now what happens if D experiences a major generator outage? D’s system goes down, because it can’t supply enough power to everyone on their system. C depends on D, so C starts to go down, but B is tied to the same grid so C starts drawing power from B. But B can’t handle the extra load, so B starts to go down. Now A ends up supplying power to B, C, and D, but it can’t handle all of that load, so it starts to go down too. So the failure starts with D, then cascades to C, B, and A, and everyone is in the dark.
Protection systems are supposed to prevent the failure from cascading across the entire grid. So ideally, if D goes down, it’s going to take C with it, but the protection systems should isolate the grid between B and C so that A and B remain running. But those protection systems don’t always work.
Every few decades, there is a major cascade failure somewhere. Then the power folks come up with protection systems that they claim will prevent the failures from cascading all throughout the grid, and then a few decades later, another failure shows that their protections weren’t as effective as they thought they were, and a few decades later it repeats.
The last major cascade failure in the U.S. was in 2003 when overloaded power transmission lines sagged from overheating and contacted trees, creating a short circuit. The protective systems that should have limited the failure didn’t work (due to a software bug), power wasn’t re-routed to limit the blackout, and much of the northeastern U.S. ended up in the dark.
To me, the event in Spain and Portugal sounds like a cascade failure.
There are all kinds of possible causes, everything from one relatively minor failure that the protection systems didn’t catch in time causing everything to go dark, to potentially terrorism or just a plain old stupid software bug in the control systems. It will be interesting to see what they end up finding as the root cause.
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### Author:  [@Jeff\_Lichtman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jeff_Lichtman)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/16 "2025-04-28T16:57:12Z")
Youtuber Diane Jennings, who lives in Marbella, Spain, posted something to her Patreon about the outage. So apparently the internet still works, at least in that part of Spain. They must have power backups for the cell towers, the servers, the routers and switches, etc. I don’t know how long the power backup will last. If it’s all batteries, it won’t stay up long.
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### Author:  [@solost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/solost)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 5:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/17 "2025-04-28T17:03:55Z")
**SenorBeef** is playing innocent, but I have my suspicions… 🤨
> [@Planning a trip to Spain and Portugal](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/planning-a-trip-to-spain-and-portugal/1016181):
>
> As per [this thread](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/opinions-on-places-in-the-world-for-americans-to-retire-to-cheaply) I might be interested in moving to Spain or Portugal, so I’m booking a trip to check them out to see how I feel about them. So it will be part vacation, part scouting trip. The time table is flexible but I’m expecting to spend maybe 3 weeks there, which could be extended a week or two. I will be arriving around Apr 20. Things I like: natural beauty, particularly with water. Beaches. Scenic road trips. Trying new foods. Bar hopping. Walkable city centers and commercial distric…
Just kidding! I think it’s pretty obvious, but I don’t want any chance of anybody thinking I’m accusing a fellow doper of international espionage ☺
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### Author:  [@xtenkfarpl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xtenkfarpl)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/18 "2025-04-28T17:20:18Z")
Clearly, the Puppeteers are trying to contact Teela Brown again.
The last time, all the phones in South America rang at once.
This time, power grids were disrupted. That’s what you get when you are dealing with someone bred for luck who doesn’t want to be found…
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### Author:  [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/19 "2025-04-28T17:36:06Z")
> [@engineer\_comp\_geek](#):
>
> The U.S. is physically too large for a single grid.
Just a minor disagreement with an otherwise excellent post; the issue isn’t that the United States or North America is physically too big for a unified grid but because largely of policy; what we think of as “The Grid” is actually a vast patchwork of state and regional level utilities and electricity providers which are some combination of private and publicly-owned. It is kind of shocking, and a testament to the people functionally managing it that this system works as well as it does, and in absence of natural disasters or Enron-type shit-fuckery rarely progresses in to cascading power failures, but it is a real mess of a system in terms of future-proofing for variable power supplies (i.e. wind and solar) and is frighteningly not robust to a Carrington-type geomagnetic storm according to a [2011 JASON group study](https://irp.fas.org/agency/dod/jason/spaceweather.pdf). We should really be building a national grid that is more robust and easier to isolate faults so that cascades don’t occur but that would be a massive investment in electrical infrastructure that nobody seems to want to consider until something dire actually happens.
Stranger
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### Author:  [@Cervaise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cervaise)
#### Post date: [April 28, 2025, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-suddenly-the-lights-went-out-in-all-of-spain-and-portugal/1017611/20 "2025-04-28T17:41:33Z")
That sounds difficult and expensive. Ooo, I think I recognize the Masked Singer’s voice!
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