Blackout

Our society would rapidly unravel without electricity –– and information

Andasol Solar Power Station, Spain. Last week’s blackout began when a solar plant in the south-west of the country disconnected suddenly. (Image: kallerna via Wikimedia Commons)

It was around 7pm when we heard that the lights were back on in Porto, 200 miles to the north of the small Portuguese village where I was visiting friends. The blackout would only last a few hours longer. At that moment we were at the checkout of an unlit supermarket in a nearby town, having scoured the shelves by the light of our phones. Our shopping baskets revealed that we were not seasoned preppers. They contained 40 litres of bottled water, along with tins of beans, peas and tuna. We also stocked up on red wine and chocolate; morale had to be maintained, after all.

Earlier that day, a power cut originating in Spain had swept across the Iberian Peninsula and part of France. Traffic lights went down and trains stopped in their tracks, above and below ground. Given that the blackout lasted less than 12 hours, our response in hindsight appears slightly hysterical. But until that update at the supermarket, which we couldn’t verify in any case, we had no way of knowing it would be over so quickly. We had no mobile reception or Internet access of any kind, and so we couldn’t communicate with anyone outside the village.

Much as one would expect in an apocalyptic film, the information flowed just long enough to provide inklings of disaster. On WhatsApp, a fake news story claimed that Russia had launched a massive cyberattack across Europe. Speaking to neighbours, we heard that the cause was in fact some kind of atmospheric phenomenon, affecting not just southern Europe but also, bizarrely, Japan. Apparently, Portugal was going to be without power for days. Then, after an hour or two, our communication channels dried up. Before long, there was no water in the taps.

Anxiety spread quickly. Outside our village, the quiet country road was backed-up with drivers rushing to fill their tanks. Some of the local grocery shops were stripped bare by panic-buyers. We kept our nerve for most of the afternoon, reassuring one another with uneasy jokes and casual speculation. After a while, though, we began asking questions. What if the shops didn’t open in the morning? What if there wasn’t any water left on the shelves? Doesn’t so-and-so down the road have a cistern, a solar panel, a Starlink connection? And so we persuaded ourselves that, actually, we had better err on the side of caution. That’s how we ended up at the supermarket, where two girls stationed at a closed door asked if we had cash, before ushering us inside. That is the nature of radical uncertainty, as typically seen in a bank run: you know you are probably overreacting, but why take the risk?

Above all, the blackout was a lesson in how utterly dependent modern society is on a product that we never see directly, and rarely think about: the constant, reliable flow of electrons through copper and aluminium wires. The incident has raised serious questions about the future of Europe’s electricity systems. To meet their environmental goals, European countries are trying to electrify large parts of their economies, including cars, household heating and industrial processes. Data centres to provide computing power will mean further, big increases in electricity demand. At the same time, Europe is rapidly switching to renewable energy sources, notably wind and solar, to provide that electricity, and in many cases is shutting down the coal, gas and nuclear-powered alternatives. According to one estimate cited by the Financial Times, government targets mean that electricity will be responsible for 70% of the continent’s energy by 2050, up from around 20% today. More than 90% of that electricity could come from renewables.

This growing dependence on electricity comes with significant risks, including sabotage. Those who suspected hostile actors to be responsible for last Monday’s blackout were not merely paranoid. Since the escalation of the war in Ukraine, numerous power cables running under the Baltic Sea have been targeted, prompting Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to disconnect from the Russian grid. Centralised electricity networks are appealing targets for terrorists and adversaries, since bringing them down can paralyse a society, and sow chaos in the process. Thanks to the digitalisation of grids, cyberattacks are increasingly plausible, and are in fact being reported with growing frequency.

The shift to green electricity also brings dangers that governments have been slow to mitigate. Battery technology for storing wind and solar power remains ineffective. This means that electricity becomes scarce — and expensive — when there is no wind or sun, but it also means that renewables can, at times, produce too much energy relative to demand, endangering the stability of the grid. By contrast, the output of gas and nuclear plants can be closely controlled to maintain a balanced supply, and their turbines are better at smoothing over disruptions. Last month, at a London conference attended by 60 countries, the International Energy Agency raised these issues as threats to energy security. In a confidential report seen by Bloomberg, the IEA warned against the “premature retirement” of less volatile energy sources that are needed to stabilise grids.

It appears likely that such vulnerabilities triggered the blackout in Spain. The country is a leading adopter of renewable energy, with 72% of its electricity coming from wind and solar in the moments before the outage struck. According to Red Eléctrica de España, the national grid operator, the crisis began when a solar plant in the south-west of the country disconnected suddenly. The cause was probably an oversupply of electricity, combined with a shortage of traditional plants that could have lowered their output in response. And this was foreseen: Red Eléctrica warned in February that, due to a “high penetration of renewable generation”, “severe” outages could be on the horizon.

Though it lasted less than a day, last Monday’s power cut will cast a long shadow over the politics of Net Zero. Last year, the Spanish government confirmed its decision to retire the country’s five nuclear power plants, a move criticised by opposition parties on the Right. Unsurprisingly, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez vehemently denied that over-reliance on green energy was culpable for last week’s blackout.

An almost identical exchange played out in Britain, with Keir Starmer adopting the same line as Sánchez, while Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch claimed that renewables were likely responsible. The blackout will certainly frighten Starmer’s Labour government, which is pushing for 95% of electricity to come from renewable sources by 2030. After all, the British grid came dangerously close to failure in January, when weak wind and solar generation struggled to meet high winter demand for electricity. The day after the Iberian power cut, former prime minister Tony Blair broke with his party by publicly stating that an ill-conceived rush for Net Zero was inviting a backlash that could “derail the whole agenda” of decarbonisation.

Meanwhile, electricity is also creating tensions between European countries. A system dominated by renewables will require a shared electricity market underpinned by an extensive network of transmission cables, allowing electrons to flow from areas with wind and sun to those without. That arrangement is still taking shape, but it’s already apparent that consumers don’t like paying more for electricity because demand is spiking elsewhere. In December, for instance, when Germany and Denmark suffered a period of dark doldrums –– cold, cloudy, windless weather –– their neighbours baulked at meeting the shortfall in generation. Norway’s governing parties pledged to sever its electricity connections with Denmark, while Sweden demanded that Germany restructure its electricity market to prevent competition from high-demand industrial regions — a request that was backed up last week by the organisation overseeing Europe’s grids. The Swedish economy minister also took the opportunity to criticise Germany for voluntarily shuttering its nuclear energy capacity. In France, meanwhile, the opposition National Rally has pledged to exit from the EU’s system of cross-border electricity trading.

The problems posed by renewables are not insurmountable, but they require a measured and honest approach, not a blind dash for quotable statistics. I write this as a supporter of green energy in principle. We should begin with a recognition that, as the energy analyst Javier Blas writes, “grid design, policy and risk mapping aren’t yet up to the task of handling too much power from renewable sources”. Rather than closing down gas and nuclear plants, governments will, for the time being, need more of them to provide resilience and backup sources of electricity. They will need to limit the share of solar and wind generation to prevent grids from becoming fragile. And they will have to upgrade infrastructure to incorporate renewables properly, while improving storage and flexibility.

This will only work if the associated costs and risks are negotiated with the public. Ofgem, Britain’s energy regulator, announced on Wednesday that it would “need hundreds of billions of pounds in investment to build the capabilities needed to run a clean power system and decarbonise the economy”. These upgrades will add further costs to consumers. Seeing your electricity bill go through the roof –– even as your local environment is overwhelmed by pylons and solar panels –– is bad enough; it is considerably worse when your government refuses to acknowledge there are any downsides to the green transition.

The political consensus around Europe’s sustainability agenda has been fraying for some time, but more major blackouts will prove fatal. Decarbonisation has become so politicised that even if renewables are not actually responsible for the failures in question, they will be discredited by association.

An even more pressing question, though, is how to safeguard against our growing dependence on electricity more generally. The Portuguese town I visited during the blackout showed an impressive degree of resilience, because it could fall back on older technologies. Within hours, uniformed wardens were directing traffic at the petrol station, where drivers did manage to refuel their cars. Here and in other local businesses, a key factor was that people still used and accepted cash. Now imagine a scenario in which the majority of vehicles, virtually all payments, and even central heating systems are dependent on electricity. Imagine that government and basic services have become heavily reliant on artificial intelligence software. Adaptation would be more difficult, and the sense of panic considerably greater.

In an ideal world, we would try to ensure that manual and mechanical systems don’t disappear from society entirely, providing a backup to digital and electrical technologies. But this seems overly optimistic. All the more reason, then, for governments to prioritise the robustness and security of our electricity networks, ensuring, among other things, that they stay ahead of the competition in the fast-evolving realm of cybersecurity. As for businesses and communities, a diesel generator or solar module for use in emergencies would not go amiss.

As I quickly realised during the outage in Portugal, what makes such situations different today compared with the recent past is the degree to which we have become conditioned to a constant flow of information. We are now so accustomed to engaging with the news on an hour-by-hour basis, if not a minute-by-minute one, that losing this link to the outside world can be profoundly disorientating and even panic-inducing. When a sudden, unexplained event ruptures the fabric of normality, it soon becomes apparent that the whole edifice of society rests on a fragile foundation of trust. Were a world of media junkies to be plunged into silence, that trust might not last very long.

This essay was originally published by UnHerd.