The Iberian Blackout Put EU Energy Security in the Spotlight

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In late April, Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France experienced the most widespread blackout in European history. As their governments and the European Union scramble to identify the root cause of the grid failure, the incident raises serious questions about the efficacy of the EU's pooled energy policy and the security of its electricity network.
Shortly after noon on April 28, electricity production across the power grids of Spain and Portugal dropped by more than half in a matter of seconds, provoking a power outage that brought industries, businesses and communities to a standstill across the Iberian peninsula. The blackout persisted throughout the day, as authorities scrambled to reboot the power grid. In some parts of the peninsula it was almost 24 hours before life returned to normal.
Multiple inquiries have since been set up to investigate the incident, most notably by an expert panel from ENTSO-E, the European umbrella group for Transmission System Operators, or TSOs, across the bloc. While physical sabotage and cyberattacks have been ruled out, it may be many months before the ENTSO-E panel as well as Spanish and Portuguese experts arrive at a definitive explanation for the incident. In the meantime, the political fallout is becoming increasingly clear, with potentially far-reaching implications for EU energy market integration, power-grid resilience, the role of renewable energies and culture war politics across the bloc.
Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022 effectively ended the EU's energy dependency on Russia and sent energy prices soaring across the bloc. But in doing so, it also intensified policy conflict around the EU's push for further integrating member states' energy markets. Many policy analysts and politicians have underlined the resilience that integrated European electricity markets can provide in the wake of losing cheap Russian gas supplies, while decrying price caps and subsidies at the member-state level, which they argue undermine a unified EU-wide approach. Others, however, argue that national governments must retain the legislative freedom to reduce energy prices to hard-pressed consumers and businesses to protect living standards and domestic economies.
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The Iberian blackout has now added another complex dimension to this ongoing debate. Some experts tout enhanced integration as the solution to future outages, with interconnected grids facilitating backup power to affected regions, while others argue that increased integration could actually exacerbate rather than ameliorate blackouts. As Jianzhong Wu, a professor at the University of Cardiff, points out, increased interconnectedness means that 'serious faults, like a large loss of synchronisation, can spread across multiple regions or even countries if not rapidly contained.'
The one thing that most energy experts can agree on, however, is the extent to which the blackout has exposed the shortcomings of a power grid designed for the age of fossil fuels, but which must now incorporate ever larger and more diverse energy sources. Even staunch advocates of renewable energy accept that the inherent variability in weather-based renewable energy sources complicates grid operators' ability to 'efficiently manage power flows and avoid grid imbalances.'
As a result, the commendable and necessary drive to complete the energy transition has to be matched by equally urgent investment in the upgrading of European power grids as fossil fuels give way to renewable energy. And the scale of the necessary investment is truly staggering. According to a 2023 International Energy Agency report, the world must add or replace 50 million miles of power grids by 2040 in order to meet climate targets and facilitate the integration of renewables into the system. That's the equivalent of all the grids currently in existence globally.
While Europe has invested more in upgrading its electricity grid than the U.S., for example, the bloc's current focus on security has already seen national governments cut public spending in order to hit the target of devoting 2 percent of GDP to defense, with capital spending on infrastructure among the casualties. Another obstacle, according to David Brayshaw, a professor at the University of Reading, is the serious knowledge gap that exists regarding the future of integrated power systems in a world increasingly affected by climate change. Brayshaw argues that while Europe's power system is evolving rapidly, driven by renewables and electrification, inadequate research has been conducted into 'how climate change will affect future power systems, or how to design grids that are truly robust.'
In the realm of cynical retail politics, and amid Europe's increasingly polarized political landscape, the blackout has been deftly weaponized by populist politicians and vested energy interests. Indeed, for the European far right and nuclear power lobby, the blackout could hardly have come at a better time.
For years, far-right skeptics of climate change have viewed the energy transition as a Trojan horse for the 'overreaching ambition of the EU.' But renewables remain very popular with voters, particularly the promise they hold of ushering in high-quality, well-paid jobs and energy self-sufficiency, which has made opposing them a hard sell for populists. However, with the governments of Spain and Portugal reluctant to jump the gun on the ongoing investigations into the April blackout, the resulting information vacuum has given the far right in Spain and beyond the opportunity to tie renewable energy—and by extension climate change policy—to the April incident and blackouts in general, thus sowing doubts among the public about the energy transition.
The nuclear power lobby has also been quick to politicize the blackout for commercial advantage. In recent years the industry has watched with dismay as the plummeting costs of renewables has caused production and profits in the sector to fall. In Spain, for example, the country's five nuclear power plants spend increasing amounts of time offline because of the EU electricity system's 'merit order' protocol, which prioritizes the cheapest form of electricity generation at any given time. In Spain and elsewhere, that increasingly means renewables. Indeed, France has long stalled on increasing its meager interconnectivity with Spain's power grid to protect its massive nuclear power industry, which produces around 75 percent of the country's electricity, from Spain's cheaper green power.
The highly disputed claim by the Spanish and EU nuclear lobbies that more nuclear power would have ameliorated the effects of the April blackout has now energized the campaign against the Spanish government plans for a complete phaseout of the nuclear industry by 2035. It is also adding momentum to the mini-revival of the industry's fortunes across the bloc, already kickstarted by the scramble to find alternatives to Russian gas.
Since the April blackout, even more explosive claims have emerged that implicate renewables in the failure. In May, for example, several news outlets cited anonymous sources in Brussels to support the now comprehensively debunked claim that a botched clandestine stress test of renewable energies was responsible for the outage. Against this backdrop, Europe increasingly risks learning all the wrong lessons from the Iberian blackout. Most notable among them is the wrongheaded notion that renewable energy production must be tailored to fit the capabilities of the existing power network, rather than the other way around.
John Boyce is an Irish freelance journalist with a background in international relations and Hispanic affairs. He writes for a variety of publications on Anglo-Irish, Spanish and European politics.
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