Spain’s Toxic Politics Clouds Investigation Into Power Blackout

(Bloomberg) -- Squabbles between Spain’s minority government and opposition parties are muddling efforts to find out and explain what caused a massive blackout that left Spain, Portugal and parts of France in the dark on Monday.

While Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica gathered millions of data points in a highly technical probe to determine what caused about two thirds of the country’s power supply to disappear from the grid, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez drew the political battle lines of the blame game that’s already brewing, pushing back against claims that his government’s expansion of wind and solar was at fault. 

“It wasn’t a problem of an excess of renewables,” he told the media on Tuesday. Political rivals who are linking the network’s vulnerability to a Socialist-led withdrawal from nuclear power are “either lying or showing their ignorance.” 

Widespread confusion and a lack of clear leadership in the aftermath of a nationwide event aren’t new in Spain. Last October, a muddled response from local, regional and state authorities to unprecedented rains that killed over 200 people in Valencia led to such outrage that politicians on both sides of the aisle and even King Felipe II had actual mud thrown at them when they visited hard-hit villages. 

The door to more frustration was opened as the causes for the worst outage in Europe in years remain murky more than 24 hours after millions were plunged into darkness. 

The clearest response came from Red Eléctrica, which pointed a rapid combination of events over a five-second span. On Monday, with Spaniards reeling, technical personnel from the grid operator spoke to the public just over two hours after the power went out, while Sánchez appeared almost three hours later.

“More than 20 hours have gone by and we have no explanation of what happened,” Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the conservative People’s Party, told local media. “The impression we are giving is disgraceful.”

The hours of silence stoked fears of a cyberattack from a foreign power. It wasn’t until Tuesday morning that Red Eléctrica ruled that option out, based on preliminary analysis done with national cyber and security agencies. 

That didn’t alleviate the confusion, as Sanchez said it was too soon to tell when the cause might be, and a judge on the country’s national court opened an investigation, saying “cyber terrorism is among the possibilities.”

Sanchez himself was asked about the likelihood that the blackout had been caused by a cyber attack at a press conference in Madrid. 

“It would be foolish to rule out any hypothesis,” the prime minister said, despite insisting that renewables weren’t to blame. “I’m not ruling it out, I’m not pointing to it.” 

Sanchez is a polarizing figure in Spain after almost seven years, during which he’s managed to survive at the head of increasingly fragile coalitions through skillful maneuvering and, at times, seeking to demonize his conservative opponents. Last year, he threatened to quit politics over a criminal probe of his wife’s business affairs which he decried as a right-wing stitch-up. 

The blackout on Monday shone an uncomfortable spotlight on the Sanchez government’s controversial position on phasing out nuclear power at a time when many countries are extending the lives of reactors or planning to build new ones. Núñez Feijóo said nuclear plants need to be retained as “backup power” for volatile solar and wind capacity.

In the meantime, experts are trying to gather the facts about what happened, and Portugal isn’t waiting for Spain and plans to request an independent audit of the incident from the European Union. 

The longer the uncertainty persists, the more pressure Sanchez will face. Experts are already at odds about the role that solar and wind played. Spain had reported an unprecedented number of hours with negative power prices in recent months, a fallout from insufficient storage capacity available to soak up increasing amounts of solar and wind supply.  

Solar farms in particular inject large amounts of power into the grid during the day and go dark at night. While these swings can create instability for the grid, the variations haven’t previously caused blackouts in the country.

For critics of renewables, the blackout represents an opportunity to go the attack. They’ve argued that limited fossil-fueled generation in Spain meant there was insufficient inertia to help maintain the grid’s frequency. But that ignores the other sources of stabilizing inertia available, including nuclear, hydro and solar thermal. 

“A lack of inertia was therefore not the main driver for the blackout,” said Adam Bell, a power analyst in the UK. “Indeed, post the frequency event no fossil generation remained online — but wind, solar and hydro did.”

On Monday, just after noon and again about 15 minutes before the outage, the frequency of the grid started shifting unusually, indicating that the grid was under stress and needed to be stabilized, according to data provided to Bloomberg by Gridradar. 

One clear lesson is that more investment is needed to ensure resilience of the system. More battery storage would have definitely helped as the technology could have responded “in a split second,” said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, an analyst with BloombergNEF. 

Other European nations are watching closely, as they could face similar issues as the continent transition to clean energy to protect environment but also reduce dependencies on fossil fuel exporters. 

“The massive blackout here in Spain and Portugal is a brutal reminder of the importance of security of supply,” Ebba Busch, Sweden’s energy minister, said in a post on social media. “Renewables and more grids alone will not build the strong power system that the EU needs for our security and our competitiveness.”

©2025 Bloomberg L.P.