The BBC headline sounds dire,
“Spain declares state of emergency, as Portugal struggles with power cut, transport chaos.”
In this case, the reality appears to match the media hype. At last report,
“Power partially restored but disruption continues into the night.”
The blackout appears to be a carbon copy of the “fire sale” plot of the 2007 movie Live Free or Die Hard (a/k/a Die Hard 4, Die Extra, Extra Hard). Airports had to close, electric-powered trains ground to a halt, everything that was featured in the movie, everything except a root cause for the chaos.
The BBC quotes a Portuguese utility as saying it may take a week to fully restore power. An earlier BBC story reported,
A sweeping power outage left millions of people in Spain, Portugal and parts of France without electricity on Monday, leading to chaotic scenes and widespread disruption.
Apparently, a problem with the Spanish-French power interface meant that Spain had to shut down and was cut off from the rest of Europe. As of three hours ago, 11 trains are still stranded in Spain. The power outage began around midday, local time.
Credit card payments, mobile phone networks, and elevators, along with everything else in modern life (except diesel busses), stopped working.
The nation’s nuclear power plants also stopped working, tripping offline to save themselves, as they are designed to do when faced with a catastrophic grid collapse. The Madrid Open tennis tournament cancelled the day’s play.
Environmentalists keep pushing us to electrify everything, most notably electric vehicles and gas stoves. I’ll repeat: do not introduce a single point of failure into a system. Today’s events in southwestern Europe illustrate this point.
