Whereas authorities currently remain unclear regarding the cause or causes of a major power disruption turning off lights, and paralyzing lives of approximately 55 million people across Spain, Portugal, and southern France, they might serve as prescient lessons regarding the importance of securing power grids from combined green energy vulnerabilities and cyber-terrorist threats.
It began suddenly on a sunny day when within a few seconds, 15 gigawatts of energy suddenly dropped from Spain’s supply — equivalent to 60% of the electricity being consumed at the time — collapsing the power grid throughout the Iberian Peninsula.
The impacts were immediate and expansively diverse.
Electrical outages left many people trapped in underground metro tunnels and on trains for hours, with others forced to walk along the tracks to access comfortable locations or vehicular transit to planned destinations.
Flights were canceled to and from dozens of major Iberian cities, including Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona, Seville and Valencia.
As countless cashless people were stranded far from homes, those seeking hotels, taxis and restaurants found that ATMs were down along with digital payment systems that rendered credit cards useless.
Similarly, neighborhood pharmacies and supermarkets went dark or shut down, and those that remained open couldn’t even process paper currency payments.
Hospital backup generators rationed electricity for critical areas such as surgical facilities, leaving doctors and nurses without access to patient data, also rendering support staff unable to carry out many duties due to telephone and email communication interruptions.
Many medical operations were forced to be cancelled altogether due to out-of-order elevators between floors.
Whereas no one seems to know with certainty what triggered the cascading blackout consequences, the interruption might have been caused by the failure of a complex network of interconnected lines known as "meshes" that distribute electrical flows across the grid to prevent overloads.
Perhaps it also involved disruptions of interconnections with neighboring countries’ grids which balance exported and imported generation and demand.
Maybe it had much to do with excessive dependence on intermittent wind power and overreliance on massive synchronous fossil energy-driven turbines that must constantly speed up or slow down as "spinning reserve" shock absorbers to accommodate fluctuations and prevent grid overloads.
University of León professor Miguel de Simón Martín observes that the Spanish peninsular power grid has historically been robust and reliable thanks to its high degree of meshing as well as its large synchronous generation capacity, with its weakest international point conditioned by the Pyrenees Mountain barrier.
Meanwhile, the electrical back and forth energy exchange capacity between Spain and the rest of Europe is quite small, representing a mere three percent of the country’s installed capacity compared with the E.U.’s 15% target member state 2030 goal.
However, as noted by Wired.com, "The increasing integration of renewable energy into the Spanish system may have exacerbated the disconnection issues and subsequent need to balance the grid."
Wired notes that renewables already account for 66% of Spain’s installed capacity— mostly wind, solar and hydro — and have generated about 60% of the country’s electricity.
Given that the blackout occurred on a sunny day and that hydro doesn’t fluctuate with weather, any attribution leaves wind as the only likely contributing culprit.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has reportedly created a commission to investigate the blackout, and while believing that renewable energy production was not to be blamed, has confirmed that his government’s authorities are looking into the possibility that it was a cyberattack on critical infrastructure.
There are many previous precedents to such suspicions.
The day before Christmas in 2015, less than two years after Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and declared it would once again become part of Mother Russia, his hackers systematically disconnected circuits, deleted backup systems and shut down substations connected to Ukraine’s Kyiv Oblenergo master power control center.
These actions caused everything dependent on electricity to fail including communications, computers, ATMs, fuel pumps, and radiation safety monitors at the old Chernobyl nuclear plant.
Stealthily disguised to appear as a financial shakedown, banks and other critical power users were told that blocked computer data could be unlocked by paying a $300 ransom in hard-to-trace Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
Instead, as discussed in my 2020 book "Cyberwarfare," the masquerade was entirely a ruse to offer the Russian government deniability cover.
And that wasn’t the first such Putin cyber sabotage ploy.
In 2008, hackers took control of government websites of the Republic of Georgia, another former Russian territory.
In addition to infiltrating President Mikheil Saakashvili’s server and defacing his picture to look like Adolf Hitler, they seized routers connecting Georgia to the internet through Russia and Turkey and shut down inbound traffic including international banking systems.
Although Russian government sources again blamed the assault on organized crime, American authorities believe it to be the work of a previously named Sixteenth Directorate, part of the infamous intelligence apparatus formerly known as the KGB, later called FAPSI.
FAPSI, or more fully titled "Service of Special Communications and Information," runs among the largest and most effective hacker schools in the world.
Fmr. U.S. Asst. Atty. Gen. for National Security John Carlin has warned of blinking red lights when it comes to the potential for a major security-driven cyberattack on our critical infrastructure.
Adding risks and vulnerabilities are alternately blinking green energy traffic signals at very dangerous global intersections.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.