According to official investigation results, the use of an experimental control system at a solar farm was responsible for the large-scale blackout in Spain and Portugal. Earlier claims about “rare weather phenomena” or supposed “wildfires” are thus exposed as mere smokescreens. (We reported.)
The power outage on the Iberian Peninsula in April 2025 has taken on new urgency. Official investigations suggest that unusual interventions at a solar facility near Badajoz put the grid under severe strain roughly half an hour before the widespread collapse. Frequency fluctuations of 0.6 hertz were documented—levels sufficient to seriously endanger the stability of a European interconnected grid. The cause apparently lay in experimental control mechanisms that were tested in the middle of ongoing operations. As early as a year before, similar disturbances had already occurred in the same region. The grid operator Red Eléctrica has now spoken of “poor facility management”—a very polite formulation for how risky these interventions actually were. It was a reckless experiment that quite obviously failed.
Adding to this was the failure of conventional power plants, which should have stepped in as a safety net. Several gas, coal, and nuclear units automatically shut down despite the fact that official thresholds had not been exceeded. This removed the backbone of stabilization. The blackout then spread rapidly—a chain reaction of the kind that experts have been warning about for years, as a risk in systems dominated by weather-dependent energy sources without sufficient reliable conventional reserves consistently in place.
Politically, the usual downplaying followed in the aftermath of the blackout. Some government agencies denied any connection with solar power experiments and pointed instead to alleged weather phenomena. But the technical analysis is clear: the experimental interventions in solar controls triggered the outage. Everything else merely distracts from the real weaknesses of the energy transition and the reliance on weather-dependent electricity generation.
