The Iberian nations of Spain and Portugal were thrust into chaos yesterday as a massive power outage swept across the entirety of their territories, leaving tens of millions without electricity.
Major cities, among them tourist destinations of international repute—Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona, Seville, and Valencia—all ground to a halt. Airports shut down, trains stalled, traffic lights failed, and hospitals scrambled to maintain critical operations on backup generators. The Madrid Open tennis tournament was suspended. Supermarkets had to close to prevent panic buying. Ordinary people were left stranded in elevators and metro tunnels, navigating pitch-black stations with phone torches. Passengers had to leave stranded trains on foot. Authorities reportedly had prior warnings, yet failed to act decisively.
By evening, partial power was finally restored—Spain’s grid operator Red Eléctrica reported meeting 43% of demand—but full recovery could nevertheless take hours, if not days. Meanwhile, Portugal’s operator warned of potential disruptions that might last for up to a week. On Monday evening, Lisbon’s mayor, Carlos Moedas, asked people to stay at home the following day, fearing the city would still be unprepared to return to normal.
This spectacular, wholly unprecedented blackout, described as a “50-year, if not 100-year incident,” exposed a deeper flaw: the catastrophic consequences of left-wing energy policies that have recklessly prioritised renewable energies while dismantling reliable alternatives like coal and nuclear power.
The immediate cause of the outage is still under investigation, with authorities so far being scarce on details. Spain’s Red Eléctrica pointed to a “strong technical fluctuation” in the European grid, with reports suggesting a failure in the interconnector between Spain and France might have caused a cascading collapse. REN, Portugal’s grid operator, posited that supposed “extreme temperature variations” may have strained high-voltage lines.
Yet, these technical details obscure a more fundamental truth: the Iberian Peninsula’s energy grid, heavily reliant on intermittent renewables, is dangerously vulnerable. A poster child for green energy, Spain derives 56% of its electricity from renewables—primarily wind and solar—with nuclear at 20% and fossil fuels at 23%. Portugal has followed a similar path. This shift has left both countries exposed to systemic fragility and unable to cope with sudden disruptions or unexpected demand surges.
Driven by ideological zeal, left-wing governments from Portugal’s PS and Spain’s PSOE parties have embraced renewable energy while enthusiastically dismantling the infrastructure that once ensured energy sovereignty and stability. Coal plants, which provide consistent baseload power, have been put out of service across Europe under pressure from loud, well-funded, and media-approved green activists. In Spain, the share of electricity production derived from coal sank from 40% in 2007 to under 2% by 2023. Nuclear power, a zero-carbon source with unmatched reliability and competitiveness, has faced similar hostility from fact-blind politicos. Spain’s seven operational reactors are under an immediate threat of being phased out, with the Sánchez government plotting to close all plants by 2035. Portugal, meanwhile, has no nuclear capacity at all, having abandoned plans for nuclear development decades ago. Instead, Lisbon leans heavily on wind and hydroelectricity, both of which falter under adverse weather or technical strain. These policies, rooted in an anti-scientific green dogma, have greatly weakened the grid.
This irrational fetishisation of renewables ignores their inherent limitations. Solar panels generate no power at night, and wind turbines stall. On April 27, 2025, Spain reportedly ran its grid on 100% renewable energy—green advocates cheered it. Yet, just days later, the same grid collapsed, plunging the nation into chaos. Low wind speeds across Western Europe, coupled with high demand, likely exacerbated the crisis, forcing reliance on aging gas plants and imports from France and Morocco. Ironically, a system hailed for its sustainability proved fatally brittle under strain. Renewables, though certainly useful and important, require powerful backup systems and massive grid upgrades to compensate for their intermittency. Hélas, this reality was ignored by socialist policymakers who prioritise optics and politicking over serious governance.
Portugal’s case is particularly remarkable. It has now been revealed that, shocking as yesterday’s crisis might have been to the general public, it was seen as highly likely by the country’s energy authorities. Indeed, it was in 2022 that the country’s then director-general of energy and geology, João Bernardo, said publicly that Portugal “faces a serious [energy] supply problem” and that “we may see supply disruptions in the very short-term.” These comments took place after a report authored by the organization under his tutelage, the Direcção-geral da Energia e da Geologia, which correctly pointed out that the closure of the country’s two coal power plants in Sines and Pego would make the system deeply dependent on imports from Spain. Yet Prime Minister António Costa, now President of the European Council, chose to ignore the agency’s recommendations and go forward with the abandonment of the plans, prioritising decarbonisation commitments despite clear warnings.
This blackout is not an isolated incident but a symptom of a broader crisis driven by a toxic mix of ideology and institutional malaise. Europe’s interconnected grids, while vital for sharing clean energy, amplify risks by de-sovereignising the energy sector. A 2003 outage in Italy, triggered by a single power line failure in Switzerland, and a 2006 German overload that affected most of Western Europe, highlight the fragility of over-reliance on renewables without sufficient baseload capacity. Meanwhile, the left’s hostility to fossil fuels and nuclear power has crippled the ability to balance intermittent sources, as seen in the low inertia issues plaguing Spain’s system.
There should be a reckoning after this. Leaders in both Spain and Portugal urged restraint, while quickly shifting blame across borders. The people of both countries should demand a serious reevaluation of energy policy, aiming for resilience and pragmatism over ideology.
Other Europeans should be paying attention to Iberia’s woes, too, because it proves how left-wing energy policies, obsessed with renewables at the expense of coal, nuclear, and gas, have engineered a grid that is fragile and prone to disastrous collapse.
The solution lies not in doubling down on green dogma but in a pragmatic energy mix that prioritises reliability. Nuclear power must be adopted, or expanded and reinforced, not abandoned. Coal and gas, while indeed undesirable, should be understood as necessary evils for the time being and serve as transitional fuels until storage technologies mature. The alternative is more blackouts, more chaos, less competitiveness, less wealth, and a deeper erosion of public trust. In a world where nothing is certain, one fact stands out, bright as day: ideology cannot power a nation.
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