This piece originally appeared in Compact.
On Monday, Spanish grid operators found themselves sprinting against sunset. The entire country had blacked out. Planes paused on the runway for want of air traffic control. Trains lurched to a stop on the tracks or sat in their bays at the station. Within a few hours, the Spanish government declared a national emergency.
The blackouts even touched France and Portugal. Europe is learning another painful lesson about its power sector: If one nation mismanages its grid, its neighbors suffer with it. If these blackouts were caused by Spain’s green-energy policies, as seems likely, these blackouts are a preview of the world to come.
The official explanation for the blackouts is a series of “anomalous oscillations” on long-distance high-voltage lines. This so-called “induced atmospheric variation,” triggered synchronization failures that kicked off power disturbances across the European power system. It's hard to tell exactly what these phrases mean as they sit somewhere between the technical and political realms; there's the question of what happened and then there's the question of who to blame.
