Toledo, Spain. On the right is the castle-fortress known as the Alcazar
In 2024, Spain relied on fossil fuels for 23% of its electricity. Its emissions per capita were below the global average. Spain is the European country with the third highest renewable energy generation capacity and 11th lowest CO2 emissions per inhabitant.
A power engineer from the U.K. explained, "The Iberian grid suffered a disturbance in the south-west at 12:33. In 3.5 seconds this worsened and the interconnection to France disconnected. All renewable generation then went off-line, followed by disconnection of all rotating generation plant. The Iberian blackout was complete within a few seconds."
Spain is fortunate to have a very sunny southern region with offshore generation sources, and a high windy Plateau (remember Quijote's windmills?)
The main source of energy in the homes is electricity, generated by wind, nuclear power and natural gas. However, as with most countries, the electric power grid in Spain is vulnerable. On April 28, 2025, there was a major power blackout through Spain. The outage affected airports, shops and offices across Spain, Portugal and parts of France.
Many people had to be rescued from stalled elevators and the subway lines were not operating. There were long lines of people waiting to take busses. The outage cut phone service and shut down traffic lights and ATM machines.
Backup systems provided power to hospitals, prisons, airports and nuclear power plants.
As to the possible cause of the massive outage, an engineer explained, "One possible cause for a highly connected network is for one area to go down due to substation transformer failure or shorted/failure of a transmission line which can cause additional circuits to open, sort of a domino effect as the system tries to stabilize (and fails)! As the dominos continue to fall - the failure area gets larger and larger."
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