Huge power cut causes chaos in Spain and Portugal as Madrid mayor warns people to stay put
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bocca di lupo
Apagón de luz: corte en España, caída en directo
btw, the best are the reader’s comments… " I’m trapped in an elevator with a lady. How much time do we have?.." 
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Except that “zero” in the graph is 10.000 MW, or about 40% of normal.
I was just about to ask whether this is expected to have any cascading effects to other countries and the power literally just got cut here.
I charged up all our power banks last night and fished out all the headtorches we own, just in case. 
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Sounds like Notte Bianca 2003, when we had just flown home from Rome. Our colleagues who stayed for the festivities were unable to check out of their hotels or get home to various parts of Europe.
Now I wish I’d charged my laptop and phone beforehand!
The reason the system failed soooo spectacularly is precisely the low level of interconnection with the networks of other countries. Current interconnection capacity of Spain is 3 GW or 2% of installed capacity in Spain..
So, no cascading effect. The cables sending electricity from France to Spain can only send 3 GW.
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Where is “here”? I’ve not heard of power failure in Switzerland.
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outskirts of Basel. i average maybe 1-2 per year.
1-2 power cuts per year? Really? I remember 1 in 17 years and that was announced (= purpously turned off for maintenance in the street).
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Probably France.
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I found this interesting, I never knew that there were power cables from the African continent to Europe.
Electricity was being pulled from Morocco and France to restore power to southern and northern Spain, Spain’s prime minister said, thanking their governments.
There are, although Morocco is actually an importer of electricity from Spain (f.ex. during 2024: 2,537 GW/h ). There are submarine cables across the strait Marruecos conecta su red a través del Estrecho para reactivar las centrales del sur de la Península
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A RCA (Root Cause Analyses for the non-consultants) is being now undertaken. For medical students: post-mortem 
despite the wishes for a sabotage or a hack, it seems that the mea culpa should be presented (together with people deposing their positions and salaries) by the largest energy producers - namely, Redeia, a ‘private’ company, with an ex-minister as CEO- The system relies too much on renewable energy sources, and the blackout came for their mismanagement - i.e. Redeia did not have a proper risk debunk process or timely response… and the 1st hiccup happened already 3 days ago…
The worst, the population had to wait 5h30 minutes until the 1st official communicate from the state (=prime minister) arrived…
let’s bet. No heads will roll…
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I read that you can’t start an electrical network from zero with renewables.
Spain apparently has five large hydroelectric power plants for this purpose - of which three were in maintenance.
Someone must have signed off on that….
Researchers say new attack could take down the European power grid. Power grid in Central Europe uses unencrypted radio signals to add and shed loads.
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it is not over until the fat woman sings… (wait, that’s not PC anymore, no?):
The price of electric energy increases by 450% today, Wednesday, post- black out
And?