Electricity is the oxygen of modern life. 

To watch the current drama in the Iberian peninsula – Spain, Portugal and parts of southwest France losing all electricity for a whole day – is to observe the vulnerability of the world we inhabit. Our lives are organised around systems with questionable robustness; like the unicycle which needs momentum to keep upright, the whole shebang is just a few strokes from crashing out. 

The story to follow is not the speed with which Spain’s freezers are switched back. Rather, it is to understand what happened, and what is to be done about it. 

Spain’s stately President Sanchez stood in a press conference today, and elegantly declared ‘let’s wait and see’. He emits plenty of emotion, but in truth acts like a Public Relations manager for a system he does not, and never will, understand. 

In Greek mythology, the mother of Achilles takes action when she discovers her son is fated to die in battle. Thetis grabs Achilles and dunks him in the magical, protective waters of the River Styx. Alas, the imprint of her fingers means the boy’s immortality is never fully sealed. Achilles remains vulnerable, by way of his unprotected heel. 

Europeans tend to assume they bathe in the magical waters of administrative competence. After all, their countries tend to work. And yet, these systems are created by people, ruled by people, subject to events, to supply and demand, to cross-border squabbles, and to the ego of those who lead. 

Electricity, like oxygen, is only political when it does not flow. 

***

Though I rarely get animated by utilities, crises bring me a-calling. 

2025’s winter storm Éowyn, for example, kicked tens of thousands of homes in the West of Ireland off the grid for more than a week. Many had to abandon their homes completely. A notable detail was that government regulations had mandated new-build homes to rid their plans of fireplaces and stoves, for sustainability reasons. The consequence was that when Plan A heating failed, plan B was nowhere to be found. 

A couple of years back, I experienced first-hand the South African electricity calamity of ‘load-shedding’. This Orwellian term weaponises consumers (the load) and venerates the system (which sheds the burden of actually delivering electricity). In 2023, the average South African faced 6.2 hours of outage per day. A notable detail from God’s Country is that outages are rooted in the sabotage of power plants by the very contractors slated to do power plant repairs. It appears that the once respected Eskom – the State’s electricity body – has become the sow that eats her own farrow. 

***

Over lunch, I tried to get my head around how Europe’s electricity grid works, and where its points of tension lie. With some pasta boiling on the gas hob, I listened to an expert podcast from the EU Think Tank, Breugel, entitled Building Europe’s Next-gen Electricity Grid. 

Our European grid (i.e. the cables that connect supply with demand) works in a kind of dance, between Generators, Distributors and Consumers. A healthy grid thrives on balance and predictability of demand for electricity produced by many sources (solar, wind, hydro, fossil fuels, nuclear). The Think Tank’s proposed strategy focuses on deeper integration of Europe’s electricity markets in a bid for efficiency.

However, this mission encounters pricing challenges. For example, connecting a high-priced electricity market (say, Germany) with a low-price electricity market (say, Sweden) results in price reductions for the Teutons, but price increases for the Vikings. In real life, this situation scuppered a recent EU investment project between the two countries.

Progress towards efficiency, as a result, is likely to be slow, even though EU policy changes (e-cars, home-heating, etc.) has sharply accelerated Europe’s demand for electricity. 

***

The current explanations for Iberia’s blackout are tentative and tenuous. Each country fingers another: the Portuguese blame the Spanish, and the Spanish suggest it’s the French. There is talk of ‘severe oscillations’ and ‘atmospheric phenomena’ – delivered with all the transparency of a riddle. 

I hope a compelling account-with-recommendations emerges, but I would not bet the hearth on it. 

In reading around the subject, the long-term solution I find most appealing calls for hyper-local generation of electricity in every community, as a guaranteed Plan B. Such a course of action is unlikely to be popular in Brussels. In my judgment, any plan which delegates control away from the centre seems counter-intuitive to technocrats.

Yet, the logic of a distributed back-up plan exists in other domains, and in other nations. For example, American legislators justify their country’s liberal gun-ownership laws (1.93 guns per adult) in part by reference to America’s ‘Plan B defence’. That is to say, an invasion of the Continental US by an outside force would be impossible, because every homestead would have the means of armed, civil resistance.

***

But let me return to the current Iberian pickle, one last time. 

I have a Lucky Luke-style cartoon in my head, in which a random Pyrenean Utilities Worker flicks the wrong switch by mistake, and plunges Spain and Portugal into darkness. He then takes off for a few days fishing. 

It is one theory of the peninsula’s electrical Achilles heel. 

Another, rooted in human psychology, is perhaps more likely: the supply of power must forever lie in the hands of Power.