There’s no better way to understand how dependent we are on electricity than to spend half a day without any. That’s what happened on Monday, when the whole of the Iberian Peninsula – Spain, where we live, and Portugal – and part of France suddenly lost power. For several hours.
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| Monday 28 April 2025: Blackout in Spain, Portugal and part of France |
Well, electricity may have had merely a baby’s potential back then, but today it has the strength of a powerful adult, the kind on whom we’ve all learned to depend.
When we came to replace our kitchen stove, Danielle, my wife, insisted on a hybrid, with two induction rings and one gas. That means we can still cook even during a power cut – or we can as long as we have matches, because in normal times the gas lights with an electrically generated spark.
Fortunately, we had matches.
What, of course, we didn’t have was any connection to the internet. I had been due to play bridge online with a friend but, without power, I could neither play nor let him know I couldn’t play: my only means of phoning people depends on a mobile network, and it was down.
That’s on top of the obvious issues of lack of light (remedied with candles), lack of refrigeration (fortunately mitigated by the relatively short duration of the blackout) and lack of TV or other forms of entertainment that we’re used to enjoying (compensated by reading).
Fortunately, since we didn’t have to go anywhere or get to the upper floors of tall buildings, we didn’t suffer the difficulties of so many who were caught in trains or even trapped in lifts. Nor were we stuck in massive jams on the roads and streets, made worse by the lack of traffic lights. The most we suffered was a little irritation, although some people – I think the total number is still in single figures – died as a result of using faulty medical equipment or generators.
There were people who were shouting about a national emergency (most of them members of the political persuasion that also felt inclined to condemn our moderate social democratic government for it). I think Gaza, or South Sudan, or immigrant communities, in the US are suffering emergencies. We suffered some inconvenience.
Well, a bit more than an inconvenience for the ones who died, I admit, but for most of us, it wasn’t that bad.
I do have to confess that my first instinct was to think the problem must be the result of an attack. After all, it was daytime, warm enough to require little heating, not hot enough to require air conditioning, but all the same the entire nation’s power grid was knocked out. Surely that was sabotage. And, of course, I had a chief suspect: Vladimir Putin. That, inevitably, also led me to criticise his pal, the man responsible for so much going wrong in the world today, that fine Mr Trump.
As it happens, with Trump’s second first hundred days just coming up, it felt that plunging a few million people into darkness and confusion was in many ways a perfectly appropriate symbol of our times.
It turns out that the cause of the blackout probably wasn’t deliberate, but simply a technical malfunction. That means it’s fixable and the government is rightly insisting that the organisations responsible fix it. I hope that’s confirmed, because I find a fault a lot easier to come to terms with than an attack.
There are also a few things that we, as individuals, need to do. One of the funnier sights of the blackout was the people, ourselves included, who had to keep nipping out to their parked cars to listen to the radio, only working source of news. How many of us have any means of hearing the news these days that doesn’t depend on a connection to mains power?
So I’m going to get a battery-operated radio. As well as battery-operated lights. Not perhaps at once, since there’s bound to be a spike in prices. But soon.
And, of course, I’m going to make sure we have plenty of matches.
