The Pain in Spain Falls Mainly on the Grid
How the Power Outage in Spain and Portugal Reminds us of the Need for Risk Management
How did 15 gigawatts of electricity just vanish from the Spanish grid in five seconds? We are in the Age of Excuses rather than the Age of Risk Management.
20 years ago, when the Philippines had regular, often scheduled blackouts, we had a joke:
Q: In the old days, what did people use to light their homes?
A: Electricity.
Europeans had better get used to this sense of humor since electricity is fast becoming a privilege rather than a right.
Two days after 15 gigawatts of electricity simply vanished from the Spanish grid within five seconds, authorities still won’t come clean and explain what happened in an event that plunged all of Spain, Portugal and parts of France into darkness for much of March 28th. A long period of silence from the authorities suggests a problem in how to allocate responsibility. Every possible explanation will make the government look incompetent, so the regulators are using the investigative pause to find the least damning excuse, and the least unsettling reason for this utter failure in risk management.
The massive power outage leaving around 60 million Europeans without electricity couldn’t possibly be due to:
hacking or a cyber attack, because that would leave Europeans in fear about how unsecure the grid actually is;
a cascading effect from an excess of supply onto the grid, as that would imply that producing too much wind and solar energy would have a destabilizing effect;
a system or line failure from France, which would suggest that the entire Iberian Peninsula energy supply depends on certain, single and extremely vulnerable junctions (sort of like Heathrow Airport).
The Spanish authorities could not blame the weather, coded as “a rare atmospheric event” or some sort of “vibrations” (there was nothing extraordinary on Monday). Whatever least damning excuse the regulators decide to use, the main reason for this power cut is the lack of competent risk management. (… or maybe, once again, it was “climate change”).
Europeans need to use this event as a learning experience to reduce exposure to vulnerabilities on the grid (risk management), strengthen the scenarios and the recovery strategies (risk assessments) and have the public be better prepared for such eventualities in the future (risk communications). I fear that the authorities will fabricate an explanation that implicates no one and then continue business as usual so as not to alarm their populations. If so, following the failure of risk management leading to the flash flood in Valencia, the Spanish government would have lost all legitimacy.
What the Public Learned
Our Internet of Things world is wonderful … until someone pulls the plug and we realize how dependent we are on the electricity behind these technologies to do basic things. Two decades ago, if the lights went out, we would worry about our freezer full of meat. Now, no electricity means no Internet, no payments, no communications, no public transportation, no heating or air conditioning, no public toilets and no water. Doors won’t open, traffic won’t move and governments, businesses and commerce won’t function.
So what did we learn? First, how lucky we were to have dodged a more serious bullet.
If a similar power cut had happened in the 40°C heat of August, the death toll would have been unspeakable.
If this had been a European-wide outage at a more central part of the grid, lasting several days, this would have done significant damage to the economy and public health.
If this had been an extended outage, like in New York in 1977, the crime and looting could have been horrific.
We learned how kind people can be, with Spanish and Portuguese villagers giving food and drinks to people stranded beside immobile trains in remote locations.
On an individual level, members of the public have to be better prepared for the next outage. As authorities invest less in infrastructure and climate activists push the grid toward more vulnerable states, blackouts will hardly be news in the coming decades. We will have to change our behavior.
Homes should have a “blackout kit” to survive longer power cuts, including cash, dried foods and charging devices.
The wealthier populations should buy water purification units, those with solar panels should invest in batteries and back-up generators.
Those less well-off will need to devise escape plans to keep safe during the violence and anarchy.
If the green transition continues without any rationality, we may have to go back to a bomb-shelter mentality.
Progress isn’t Linear
What this power outage has taught us, most importantly, is that we are not on a linear path of progress and can no longer assume that societal goods in the future will be better than the past. As our regulators use precaution and uncertainty management as their key regulatory tools (and lose the capacity to manage risks), western societies will have to sacrifice many of the hard-won benefits and comforts of modern living (like a reliable power supply). As activist assaults on the capitalist system continue, supply chains and safety nets will become less stable, access to affordable food and energy will be undermined and social goods will become scarce.
This event should remind Europeans how fortunate they have been to have lived in such a time of abundance, prosperity and, for the most part, peace. The generations following the Boomers have not really known want, have benefitted from the greatest economic and technological expansion known to history and have seen life expectancy and wellness grow at an unprecedented pace. But they have come to expect this continued march of progress. They have never seen the lights go out and don’t expect such events to ever occur.
Activists from these generations of peace and prosperity think they are no longer vulnerable – that their expensive green decisions, which produce less, and more expensive food and energy, won’t put anyone at risk. Advancing the pace of their green temples, they do not understand the vulnerability of certain populations or the need for economies to continue to grow and progress. They speak of living in a post-capitalist age without realizing how the benefits they take for granted can be lost with a flick of the switch.
Maybe a few years in the intermittent dark will silence these zealots. It is sad to think that Europeans will need a crisis to remind them of how they have to fight to preserve their privileges and security.