The Iberian Peninsula’s recent power outage exposed our deep reliance on electricity and digital systems. One village’s self-sufficient approach offers a glimpse of a more resilient future.

There’s no better way to reflect on our civilization’s dependence upon energy, electricity, and digital information than seeing how a pervasive blackout can instantly send us back to the pre-modern world.

It happened in the Iberian Peninsula early this week, which presumes to keep a modern, well-maintained energy grid that, on windy and sunny days, can run almost entirely on renewables (including biomass), backed up by big hydropower when there’s no drought, nuclear energy, natural gas, and energy imports.

But authorities at Red Eléctrica de España (REE), the entity managing Spain’s national electricity transmission system that operates the high-voltage grid, learned a hard lesson: systems designed to run on built-up inertia deal poorly with high-voltage sudden oscillations and imbalances and a large proportion of renewables in the energy mix.

At the moment of the outage, 78% of Spain’s energy generation came from renewables, 60% of which was solar photovoltaic. This may have led to voltage drops and a cascade triggering of the automatic protection mechanisms designed to avoid overheating and fires. Most likely, the safety measures designed for an interconnected system prevented the whole network from functioning.

Fortunately, despite ongoing investigations not ruling out any cause, the Iberian grid didn’t suffer a coordinated attack to shut it down. However, given the apparent lack of emergency redundancies, the event shows it wouldn’t be as complicated as desired to do so. Now, imagine if such a blackout were caused by a black swan—something big enough to keep the grid, infrastructures, and ultimately the very fabric of society in place.

The tiny village operating its own grid

In this whole blackout story, there’s a small place up in the mountains that resisted with the power on against all odds, becoming an Asterix village of sorts, an island of off-grid normalcy in a land gone dark.

On the other side of this story, there’s a small village in Northern Spain. Oseja de Sajambre is a Leonese town of 226 inhabitants located in the breathtaking Picos de Europa National Park, an evergreen mountain range that was spotted from the sea by seafarers returning from America over the centuries, making its namesake (“European Peaks”) stick.

This village had suffered from underinvestment in energy provision and was concerned about chronic power cuts during blizzards and other high-altitude weather events. It decided to invest in a reliable grid system with a built-in “island mode” that allows it to run autonomously and become electrically self-sufficient if the connection to the external grid malfunctions.

Oseja de Sajambre’s off-grid mode turned it into the only village in the whole Iberian Peninsula to avoid the blackout altogether. According to its mayor, Antonio Jaime Mendoza, the power imbalance was only perceived by “those who were watching television.” By that time, the mayor received the alert from their power system, which was automatically switching to “island mode” to run on its own, and within half an hour, the town was electrically self-sufficient. Anything taking place in the system didn’t affect them. The part was proven more resilient than the whole.

Ojeda de Sajambre designed its autonomous grid to transform the potential disadvantage of its remote and high-altitude location into an asset: the winter blizzards and storms turned into incentives to invest locally in three power plants that generate electricity and send it to the main grid through Asturias and Cantabria, where cables get often damaged by wind and snow.

After years of frustration, the village agreed with the owners of the local small hydropower plants to “island” one of the plants to ensure local self-supply in case of emergency. Now, they disconnect each time there’s an issue with the main supply, powering the entire municipality with local hydropower.

The mayor of Oseja demands self-reflection after the massive outage. Why not design redundancies that would make local populations energy self-sufficient in case of emergency? Are big energy generators preventing such local grids with built-in “island mode” from flourishing, afraid of losing their de facto monopoly, which makes consumers pay for grid improvements in their monthly bills?

A world that relies on normalcy

When it’s so easy to bring society back to the pre-industrial era for a few hours, one wonders what would happen if a coordinated attack could turn such a blackout into a longer-lasting calamity. It would take a mere few weeks to make things very complicated in a complex modern society to conduct its most basic everyday tasks.

We recently traveled abroad, and we noticed airports were calmer than usual for the reasons you have in mind; let’s call it the Trump Administration’s effect on international travel coming in and out of the US. Perhaps because traveling felt a bit exceptional, I noticed things I wouldn’t have paid attention to at all otherwise. I realized, for example, that I hadn’t used cash (no bills, no money) for a single time in over a week.

Then I realized this wasn’t exceptional. I’ve been keeping a few euro bills since we moved to the US from France in mid-2022, and it’s been hard for me to spend them, even if we’ve traveled to Europe several times after that. We’ve also been to places where the euro isn’t the currency: Britain, Denmark, or Norway, to name a few. Interestingly, I haven’t used cash on either of those trips. In those places, I managed to rent and recharge electric cars, take ferries, and pay for all expenses, big and small, using no actual money.

But when I was about to write this today, I tried to make what I supposed would be a good mental exercise: When was the last time I used cash (dollar bills, dimes, whatever) to pay for something? A few years back, having parked the car on some street with an old parking meter accepting only coins would have prompted me to keep at least a few coins in the car. These days, not even that.

Our technology-dependent way of doing things

So, it’s been several months, if not years, since I paid for something with cash. Small charges, tips, transportation fares, stipends for the kids, you name it. These days, our phones and credit cards have most of us covered to pay for it all, though there’s one caveat (somebody reminded me not long ago): this is only available long term—or what it looks like permanently—to those fortunate to have a good credit rating and a bank account somewhere to ultimately pay (digitally and in the background) for our not-so-lavish expenses.

So, when we were on a Greek island trying to be nice to somebody, I spotted my opportunity: I wanted to unload at least a portion of that cash and offered 250 euros in 5 bills of 50. I felt like I was going back to another moment in time, when in fact it hasn’t been that long since cash was much, much more important in our everyday lives.

How do I have some cash in euros, to begin with? It’s not that I went to the bank to try to have it, just as any person planning for resilience would recommend, but a present from my parents to our family, for they prefer to give us something to buy whatever we want. This worked fine when we lived in Europe—our kids were happy to find quick use to some cash, albeit not so much anymore.

I even remember attending a summer writing course in the California Sierras, where coffee and self-service breakfast could only be paid for via a popular app for transactions. Smartphones and credit cards have taken over in such a way that cash has become almost a nuisance, especially when buying little things that require getting small change, which we end up collecting and then keeping, unable to unload it in a meaningful (and tactful) way.

When convenience dictates major societal trends

I say tactful or good-natured because I vividly remember something that happened to me with my youngest kid. When we lived in Paris, we took the metro from the center to the 20th Arrondissement, where our children had Spanish classes for free, along with other local children who had at least one parent from Spain, as part of a program covered by the Spanish embassy.

They didn’t like to take what seemed such a long trip to do the class, so I always promised a little treat while they waited; one day, I decided to use small coins I had collected from probably a few random purchases or metro fares and gave him a big deal of especially small coins, which we counted to get a pastry that cost a little over 1 euro.

I saw my son enter the store with a load of coins in the little cloth bag I provided, pointing at the pastry, then proceeding to pay. I must have looked elsewhere because I didn’t see what happened inside; I just saw him leaving the store, looking at me with a sad face. What happened? —I asked. Apparently, the lady at the counter did not like my gesture with my son and took it almost as an affront or a prank from an adult towards her—how dare I! Why not a bill, a big 2-euro coin, a couple of coins (say, one 1-euro coin plus a 50-cent one, both quite common), and instead all these 2-cent, 5-cent, and even 1-cent midgets?

So I looked inside, and I must have imagined it, but what I think I saw was the lady at the counter scorning me as she talked with another customer, who must have been an old lady. Perhaps, with such an action, she gained bigger sympathy with a good customer (the one talking to her inside the store) instead of being nice with a random kid that didn’t seem familiar to her.

Whatever she thought, I didn’t reenter the store to pay with my card or my telephone, for I surely didn’t have any cash with me. We didn’t buy anything from that place anymore, though I’m sure that the event did bother my son, who was around 8 years old or so back then. So even if you have the exact amount of money to pay for something, the person at the store can decide whether or not that money has the actual value it does as a currency when it takes more time and attention than necessary to count and process —he might have asked, though I don’t remember.

The incredible things we seamlessly do every day

I think about all this after talking to a relative over a messaging app on my phone, which allows us to talk for as much time as possible for free despite being thousands of miles away and in two separate countries. We take our world of digital convenience for granted; it really started decades ago, when banks and credit card companies agreed to create systems for digital transactions, like the SWIFT system—short for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication—created in 1973 by a group of international banks to replace the unreliable telex system for cross-border financial communication.

Before SWIFT, international financing was done mainly manually, and it was error-prone, having no real standardized message format. The consortium of 239 banks from 15 countries set up a cooperative society controlled by the members, and it didn’t move money: it only sent secure financial messages between banks to initiate actual payments, trades, or settlements.

Credit card payments use their own networks, payment processors, and merchant acquirers, and their systems are close to real-time. But, as proprietary networks that handle authorization, clearing, and settlement, as well as enforce fraud prevention, VisaNet and Mastercard Network, the two biggest ones, charge hefty fees per transaction that affect merchants and cardholders.

Our need for convenience is too big to resist such systems, and when people started to create alternative systems for transactions using technologies such as distributed databases (like crypto), the reliance of these systems on energy and functional networks for them to work seamlessly has become even bigger.

I wonder what would happen if, all of a sudden, a series of successful coordinated attacks against energy and communication networks affected simultaneously enough people and systems to make it very difficult—and at times impossible—to pay with our credit cards or phones, while also putting ATMs and international transaction systems out of order, if only for a few days. Such a cascading event, which is possible, would test our resilience and patience as complex, mainly urban, highly technical societies.

Domino as a national sport

As I do almost every week, I talked to some of my relatives in Spain to plan for our next trip there, hopefully sometime in the summer, to hear that our kids’ cousins and other children we know with their respective ages are already in camp mode, booked for the holidays with all sorts of activities.

This time felt different, though, for millions of people had spent a few hours (in some places, an entire day) with no electricity or any service depending on it. The country had suffered a massive blackout, though we talked about normal plans designed for a predictable world with several technological layers on top, all of them interdependent and energy-hungry. When I called from the US West Coast on Monday, April 28, the generalized blackout had already been left behind in many places.

When Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez addressed the country 11 hours after the Iberian Peninsula ground to a halt, some places still had no power. As for the causes, he merely said that government experts were still trying to determine what happened. That won’t be enough, and the blackout is already prompting the country to work on a resilient mechanism against cascade effects in its massive, interconnected network.

When I woke up one day after, the event’s repercussions were all over the Spanish and international press: at least five people died due to causes related to the event (a faulty generator poisoned a family in Ourense in their sleep, a ventilator-dependent woman died in Valencia, and another woman died in Madrid due to a fire); millions of people couldn’t work and got stuck far from their homes for hours; and there were many small acts of civility and solidarity to help one another or just spend some time together. There were certainly many conversations regarding our energy-dependent world.

Memories of mostly-analog summers

We don’t realize how much our life depends on flawless infrastructures, services, and institutions working properly until a systemic threat reminds us that, sometimes, things can go dark; we are one black swan type of event away from realizing it.

In this context of hyperconnectivity, all we see is an opportunity to plan ahead and avoid thinking too much about unforeseen events with an oversized impact. Of course, parents do all the research and pay for the activities thanks to their powered and connected devices, using digital transactions. The internet’s very origin and design are an attempt to increase the resilience of communication infrastructures after one unpredictable attack, hence its decentralized, mesh-like structure.

Seeking solace in normality, people go about their day. At this time of year, parents have already enrolled their kids in as many summer activities as possible; they seem to be the ones in need of digital schedulers and AI to micromanage their time and squeeze the utility out of it. None of this would have made much sense not long ago.

Overscheduling did not happen when I was growing up and kids learned to deal with tedium, plenty of analog free time, and a combination of low expectations with a somewhat nice and safe reality: you would have a bicycle and plenty of kids in your age range and situation, so there were many projects and outlandish happenings to transform the ennui into little memorable adventures.

After noon, if the heat was too intense, no-AC small-town Spain would go into siesta mode, at least concerning adults, pets, and farm animals, even flies. We kids would find the coolest place around to play Spanish cards or cool down in the closest small creek natural pool. We weren’t less happy with the need for power and digital tools at every moment; I’d argue the contrary, even taking into consideration our tendencies to idealize the past.

A world that made sense in analog mode

This isn’t only my personal experience and that of my siblings, for many people I know (from, say, young Generation X folks to young Millennials) were stuck with their parents’ summer plans and would spend at least a part of the summer in some laid back environment: a sleepy beach or mountain town for those who lived in the area of their ancestors, or the small villages their parents or grandparents had left generations back to go live in the city.

In the places I spent the summer, the two sleepy villages where my ancestors came from (one very green and cool in summer, some sort of Iberian version of Ireland, and the other dustier and warmer, falling better into the stereotype depicting Spanish villages as the ones in the Meseta Central, Spain’s inner plateau, cold in winter and scorching hot in summer), you could get my genealogy dating back centuries just by going to the local church and see the records of births and deaths, and so one friend of the family and “summer neighbor,” a historian in Santiago de Compostela, did so with one of the branches.

These places were “analog” or “naturally off-grid” by design. Built over the centuries out of necessity, they had streets and little roads thought out for draft animals and ox-drawn rustic wooden carts with huge wheels on the side (these weren’t in use anymore, though people kept them around). The core of both places was the church’s meadow or plaza, surrounded by trees, where all events happened, and we played pickup football. There were stream-fed fountains with cool water and frogs jumping around, which normally included a covered pool to wash clothes that nobody used anymore.

Of course, asphalt, electricity, and public lighting had arrived way before I was born, but we barely would have felt an outage in those places during summer. One of the houses where we stayed, which belonged to my grandparents, still had an old wood-burning cast iron kitchen, which was a matter of embarrassment and self-perceived awkwardness more than any other thing: places were transforming fast, and that world was disappearing before my eyes, a little bit more every summer I went.

Things have changed

Would a generalized blackout of several hours, or even a day or week-long blackout, have stopped the people from those places back then from going about their day nonchalantly? No. Some food in the fridge and big freezer would have ended up spoiled, but little else. Today, it brings the region to a technical standstill.

As for the lack of Television and radio, I don’t think that would have dramatically transformed the reality I saw, which was in retreat: people would talk in bars, mature men playing dominoes and cards, laughing and chatting; women with young kids talking while doing something almost-always more productive with their unbound free time…

In the periphery of modernity, the actual “news” that mattered was who was arriving on vacation, which peddler’s car was honking in the square to sell what, who was getting married in the vicinity, and who had just died. That world changed very quickly, and kids growing up in similar places these days are as dependent on screens and pervasive electricity as any hyper-connected peer in the city. Not anymore, now, most places feel like passive hubs in a world of screens and automation.

Here’s what happened: on April 28, 2025, a massive power outage struck Spain, Portugal, and parts of France, upending the daily lives of millions. Fortunately, most people behaved stoically and tried to give their best side to get out of potentially stressful situations when they felt stranded by public transportation, stuck in the chaos of traffic, or unable to contact their loved ones instantly, once cell phone towers, and the battery of cellphones themselves, drained their power. This is at least the information I got from a few relatives and friends, all of whom could reply back because the power had returned to most urban areas after a few hours, or so it did in the Barcelona metropolitan area.

The blackout began around 12.33 PM local time, halting all public transportation dependent on electrical signage and powertrains, grounding flights, and disrupting communication networks. Hospitals (keeping some patients on life support or dependent on electric machines like ventilators) had to run generators to avoid irreparable disruption.

Our ultimate reliability in good Samaritans

Authorities attribute the outage to a rare atmospheric phenomenon causing “anomalous oscillations” in high-voltage lines, leading to synchronization failures in the European electricity grid. It didn’t take long for some media to link the grid issues to the country’s energy mix, which has pivoted to renewables in the last decades as the country has extended the operating life of its nuclear power plants but plans to phase them all out by 2035, aligning with the goal to achieve 100% renewable energy by 2050. In 2024, renewable sources accounted for about 56% of Spain’s electricity generation (23% in wind power, 20% in solar power, and 13.6% in hydropower).

While some areas began restoring power within hours, full stabilization is expected to take several days. Investigations are ongoing, but officials have ruled out cyberattacks as the cause. The massive power outage came a mere week after a similar event of lesser scale, which made London Heathrow (LHR), Europe’s busiest airport, inoperable for almost a day.

Also, millions of elevators (in countries where most people live in apartments) stopped working, likely trapping some people inside. Growing up in this environment, I’m aware that elevators in small building coops, the most common setup in Spain (and I’m guessing urban Portugal too), include by design a safety key that allows opening the elevator from the outside, permitting people trapped in between floors to access one or the other stage.

Many stories have resurfaced regarding the blackout: a calm mother delivering her baby in a bed that the hospital approached towards the window to maximize natural light, people stuck in Ski gondolas in the ski resort of Sierra Nevada, Andalusia, rescued with an improvised system of ropes that allowed the skiers to rappel to the ground, and many, many people altruistically giving water, food, and/or a ride to people stranded after trains stalled in odd places.

That said, we can imagine the millions of anonymous situations caused by one simple, generalized disruption that our ancestors a mere 150 years ago wouldn’t have known about: the interruption of electricity across the vast, invisible networks we have built to power our lives, from the big things to the most insignificant ones. Even some rings and other pseudo-jewelry, like Aura, depend on a charger in our times.

The power-hungry fabric of reality of our “mirrorworld”

The generalized, instant blackout of a chunk of the interconnected European electrical grid, going from France (a country that exports electricity from its nuclear generators), Spain, and Portugal, highlights how easy it is to knock out “normality” for three-quarters of a total Iberian population of 60 million people, in a matter of seconds (the Canary Islands, Madeira, Açores, the Balearic Islands, and the North-Africa Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla experienced no issues).

Due to the event, everything stopped working instantly, interrupting the interconnected fabric of reality we’ve built atop the physical world: no calls among people, no connectivity of infrastructures, no automated safety measures in place. Most people behaved stoically to the instant changes: no traffic lights, ATM machines out of order and no way to use credit card or digital payment systems, no working airports, no train, metro, and tram networks used by millions every day, no open gas pumps, no cellphone connectivity, and the impossibility of authorities (local police, traffic police, regional and state police) to coordinate actions seamlessly…

The more one thinks about it, the easier it is to realize how much modern society depends on a set of technological layers that run our world. A few days without this technology, and things would begin to fall apart. A few weeks? Civil unrest and, perhaps, a temporary return to paper bureaucracies.

One would have thought that buildings, townhomes, and single-family homes with solar panels would have been spared from the event, but the design of such systems in Spain and Portugal, as well as in most of Europe, ties solar installation to the grid, as they are a part of the whole and not considered autonomous energy systems capable of functioning independently: a safety feature called anti-islanding prevents solar generation to keep working during a blackout.

Shipwrecked in the 21st century

If grid-tied solar systems automatically cease operation to prevent electricity from being sent back into the grid when utility workers might be repairing power lines, is there a way to be fully off-grid in Spain and Portugal? Unless one lives in an isolated area, code-approved home solar systems in much of Europe aren’t designed to work autonomously, which is to say: they are designed to perform only under ideal conditions. Under a black swan event, they’d be inoperable unless homes use more expensive battery storage systems and hybrid systems that can work both connected to the grid and independently.

More expensive inverters include a backup box that helps solar systems connected to the grid switch to backup mode during a power outage, operating in “island mode.” Most Spanish and Portuguese households using solar lacked such inverters.

This is perhaps an opportunity for communities to take a more active role in their energy future, investing in infrastructures that can run autonomously when the moment arrives, and so should households capable of doing so.

Most of us like good dystopian fiction and would love fiction to remain so. When something like the Iberian blackout happens, one evokes possible beginnings of collapse unraveling at a big scale, turning complex societies into fragile zones governed by marauders as in failed States and regions from Haiti, Somalia, Syria, etc.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road can evoke our unsettling fragility, even when things are “working” most of the time. We live one black swan event away from needing serious disaster preparation for at least a few days’ worth of “reality.” Without electricity, societies can plunge more easily than we thought into confusion and isolation. When the lights go out, are we closer to McCarthy’s ash-covered roads than we like to admit?

An even more energy-hungry future

Given the event’s location, the Iberian Peninsula, I’d rather evoke Blindness, the book by Portuguese writer José Saramago. It is a breathtaking, riveting narrative that evolves as one gigantic sentence separated by commas, in which a sudden epidemic causes the collective unraveling and institutional failure that a black swan calamity could trigger.

Both books have been adapted to cinema, if you think you can’t afford to read either. I recommend reading over any of the movies; they are short books, so poetic and masterfully executed that you won’t regret it (to those lacking time because of “life,” there are audio versions you could get on the main platforms).

On the other side of reality, we can also argue that a day without power may make us appreciate the good things that come with modernity—and also its cautionary tales.

That said, when I was a kid playing in summer, I couldn’t care less about power: we didn’t depend on AC to refresh ourselves, sometimes staying out the whole day, drinking cold water from streams, and cooling the fruit we’d pick from the trees in stream pools.

AI models will be less lean in using energy than we (sentient beings in the flesh) were back then, with the energy we ran on to unleash our creativity.