Life in the Iberian blackout
A twee populace dresses up failure as resilience
Most Pimlico Journal readers will be aware of the massive blackout in Spain and Portugal on Monday. But in case you aren’t, power was gone from large parts of the country for approximately twelve hours, plunging cities into chaos. Phone coverage was extremely intermittent, making communications all but impossible. All major transport arteries were nearly unusable.
The cause? That remains somewhat unclear, but it is very likely that the growing share of renewables in our energy mix played a major role. At 12:33 CEST, two sudden losses1 — probably from solar plants in southwestern Spain — knocked out power equivalent to sixty percent of national demand. Just 1.5 seconds apart, they sent grid frequency below 50 Hz and overwhelmed backup systems, triggering a full shutdown. The grid was exposed: traditional plants like gas and nuclear were either totally shut down or producing only minimal amounts of energy at this time, unable to compete with cheaper renewables. But unlike gas and nuclear, solar and wind depend on the weather, and lack the reserves needed to stabilise frequency in real time. The main lesson here isn’t to abandon solar, which is a form of electricity generation that makes sense in Spain — it’s to stop dismantling conventional backup systems like nuclear plants, as is favoured by large parts of the European Left.
As always in politics, the blame will fall on whomever is more expedient, be it Russian hackers, climate change, or not listening to the warnings on one’s daily horoscope. Spain’s socialist Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has already found the perfect scapegoat: private energy companies! (He has offered no rationale for this assertion.) He’s also made it clear that anyone suggesting a larger share of nuclear power (never mind coal or gas) could have prevented this disaster is peddling ‘disinformation’. In the supreme wisdom of our illustrious and infallible leader, nuclear plants were themselves to blame for the slower-than-desired recovery. (Once again, no rationale has been offered for this assertion.) The only real takeaway is that the Spanish authorities were as unprepared to deal with whatever happened here as they were during the flash floods in Valencia a couple of months ago.
A full autopsy of what happened will surely come out eventually. But instead of attempting to analyse the cause of the blackouts, today I am writing about the response. More precisely, what it was like to be someone living in the city centre of Madrid during the ‘end of times’ (as many people really believed it to be, judging by their words and actions)? I hope to show readers of this journal how the ‘last man’ — or the ‘bugman’, as Bronze Age Pervert would call him — behaves in a supposedly apocalyptic situation. (Or maybe it’s just us Spaniards: we’re practically African, if you ask any self-respecting Nordicist.)
The first few minutes of the blackout had me wishing that, in the upcoming conclave, the esteemed cardinals would elect Hans-Hermann Hoppe as the next pope. The fundamental truth of the anarcho-capitalist gospel was unfolding before my very eyes: with the traffic lights out, the streets had become a self-regulating miracle of spontaneous order. Much to the disappointment of certain readers, the few ethnic minorities around me had not availed themselves of the opportunity to assault the nearest Gucci store for some ‘fire drip’. In fact, the only noticeable difference was a marked increase in the number of Indians carelessly meandering through the street, momentarily left without a job thanks to the collapse of Uber Eats.
However, the gawkers who — like myself — belong to that strange brotherhood of men who were wishing for something to happen, did not have to wait long before being satisfied. People poured out from their offices into the streets to exchange information. All of Madrid was affected? No, all of Spain! Nay, Europe! Wrong again — the entire world! Someone’s cousin’s girlfriend’s stepfather lives in Wisconsin and apparently they, too, were without power. Putler’s evil tentacles were far-reaching indeed. It seemed that any minute now, Spetsnaz soldiers would paradrop in and take the city.
It was at this point that scenes reminiscent of the dumbest days of Covid began to unfold: people started queuing outside supermarkets to secure their survival rations while the supermarket staff, having spontaneously appointed themselves as rationing commissars, made sure that no one dared exceed their fair share. (Naturally, our noble commissars didn’t dare tell the histrionic, obese middle-aged women that no amount of bottled water was going to get them through any kind of disaster.) The most urgent need, however, appeared to not be water, but radios: the only lifeline for those who, unlike me, are unfortunate enough not to work for visionary corporate overlords whose benevolence extends to backup generators, ensuring productivity even in the face of apparent societal collapse.
But what struck me most was not the failure of infrastructure. It was the response. People are sheep.
Despite the fact that the radios provided absolutely no information that couldn’t just as easily be gathered by chatting with the nearest stranger on the street, people still flocked to buy them en masse — not because they informed, but because they soothed. That, more than anything, was the truly depressing part. Put our good-looking, well-spoken Prime Minister in front of a microphone to reassure the nation that everything is under control, and the ‘people’ will happily follow him off a cliff, like lemmings.
Not everyone, though, was equally panicked. Several hours into the blackout, two American tourists — dressed as if Madrid was someplace where one goes on safari — asked me whether powerless ATMs were just part of the local charm. They were, of course, somehow completely oblivious to the chaos unfolding around them. As I explained the situation to the Americans, their eyes grew wide with astonishment: they couldn’t believe that anyone amongst these primitive tribes could speak more than a smattering of English. Somehow, it was the least surprising thing that happened all day.
Walking back home, one could almost mistake this for a day of celebration. The panic had subsided; the streets echoed with animated chatter; the terraces and beer gardens, even more crowded than usual, buzzed with the sound of collective indifference. Crowds gathered around a hippie and his guitar — ‘name a more iconic duo’ — to sing songs of sweet bohemian carelessness. Successive waves of cheers and clapping rang throughout the city as block after block received power. Yes: clapping!
In the moment, you might have been forgiven for finding this all rather charming. A city coming together, bustling bars, neighbours chatting... But beneath the surface-level warmth lay something far more unsettling: a collective willingness to normalise dysfunction; to dress up failure as resilience. The opinion pieces written the day after heaped praise upon the citizenry for their civic-mindedness. Outrage was in short supply: no one seemed concerned that the public had so eagerly — and cheerfully! — swallowed what ought to have been a national scandal. Over on Spanish Twitter, our noble Prime Minister was showered with sympathy for stoically weathering Covid, a volcanic eruption, and now this — as if widespread institutional failure were just another natural disaster. ‘Spain is different.’ Well, perhaps. But what looked like stoicism and a joie de vivre in the face of adversity was, in truth, indifference with a smile.
The West’s decline and slide towards the Third World happens so gradually that it is hard for the untrained eye to notice it. Incidents like this should be a wake-up call. This is a reminder of how much it cost to get here, and how easy it is to let it slip away. The world as we know it ends not with a bang, but with cheers; not with lamentations, but with celebrations of a ‘return to community values’.
This article was written by Exhausted Food Guy, a Pimlico Journal contributor from Spain. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.
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The exact cause of these sudden losses remains uncertain.
Paddington Bear Nationalism for the Spaniards: "the Blitz spirit". It was like this after the race riots in Britain last summer when a whole load of idiots went and tidied up the mosques. The Guardian produced a cartoon of hooded riot policeman standing in front of foreign temples reciting Churchill's 'Never Surrender' speech. The idea that nationwide race riots shouldn't be happening at all, and that we're resembling more and more a third world souk passed notice.
Really good piece, guys.
On day 1 after the blackout apart from the resilience images, the focus of the media and the society went away from everything that happened behind all that: people died, business lost their inventory, people couldn’t go back home, people got trapped in the middle of nowhere, etc.
In twitter Spain and, as a consequence, in the real world, there is a part of the population that is unable to understand that there is an existence apart from their own and their tiny little worlds that just cover a few blocks and a limited knowledge of anything outside of it. Little by little communities are dying and with it goes the capacity of turning the moral decline that comes alongside the economic one.