Why Alternative Energy Will Cause More Blackouts
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At 12:33 on the afternoon of 28 April 2025, mainland Spain and Portugal lost their electricity supply. Red Eléctrica de España, the Spanish transmission operator, logged the loss of about fifteen gigawatts of generation – close to sixty per cent of Spanish demand at that moment – within seconds.
Supply was interrupted for roughly ten hours across most of the peninsula and longer in some districts, affecting an estimated sixty million people. Trains stopped between stations, payment terminals froze, mobile service thinned as tower batteries drained, and water pressure sagged in elevated neighbourhoods.
The final report from ENTSO-E, the European network of transmission operators, published on 20 March 2026, attributed the event to a combination of technical factors and successive generation disconnections rather than to a single fault. Nothing had attacked the Iberian grid, which is part of why the afternoon deserves to be remembered. Every serious rehearsal the industry runs assumes something worse.
Since then the system has not become more forgiving. On 4 May 2026, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation issued a Level 3 “Essential Actions” alert, its highest severity, after a run of incidents in which a thousand megawatts or more of computing load dropped off the bulk power system without warning.
NERC’s State of Reliability for 2026 recorded conventional forced-outage rates climbing to 9.2 per cent, and documented one event in which data-centre uninterruptible power supplies tripped during an otherwise routine fault and removed 1,800 megawatts in a single movement.
By August the subject had reached the New York Times Magazine, where Mark Lauby, NERC’s chief engineer, argued that the network’s complexity and redundancy made a cascading national collapse “unlikely”. Federal regulators have taken a less relaxed view: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has treated the physical protection of substations as a national security matter since riflemen fired on one in California in 2013.
Alongside the present tense sits evidence that has been produced in public for fifteen years and read almost exclusively inside the industry. Since 2011, NERC’s information-sharing arm has run a biennial exercise called GridEx, in which utilities, agencies and cross-border partners respond to a scripted emergency on the real bulk power system, using real spares, real fuel contracts and real staffing.
The eighth edition ran on 18 and 19 November 2025 and drew more than three hundred and seventy participating organisations, an increase of nearly fifty per cent over 2023. The scenario was a coordinated cyber and physical attack by a nation-state adversary, with intrusion and physical damage timed to compound each other. The resulting report, published on 2 March 2026 and running to thirty-two pages, concentrated on communication and coordination.
What it did not do is establish a restoration timeline. An exercise tests a scenario and shows where assumptions break; it does not measure how long a real outage would last.
A third line of evidence arrives by an entirely different route. A nuclear burst high above the atmosphere produces an electromagnetic pulse in three waves, the slowest of which behaves like a continent-wide geomagnetic storm.
The physics was demonstrated by accident in July 1962, when a 1.4-megaton test called Starfish Prime detonated roughly four hundred kilometres above Johnston Atoll and knocked out streetlights in Hawaii, some fifteen hundred kilometres away. Congress commissioned a study in 2001, and its reports, delivered in 2004, 2008 and 2015, produced a figure that never entered public consciousness.
William R. Graham, the physicist who chaired the commission and had earlier served as science adviser to Ronald Reagan, testified that if the power went out and stayed out for as long as a year, nine out of ten Americans would be dead – not from the pulse, but from the failure of water treatment, cold storage, fuel distribution and medical care. That number is a scenario projection built on stated assumptions rather than an observation, and it is contested. It is also the only serious estimate anyone has produced.
The difficult question is not whether any of this can happen. It is how much damage a particular event would cause, and how long the repair would take.
What follows, in the order it unfolds:
- ⚡ How a blackout spreads – the mechanics of a cascade, the four ways an adversary can trigger one, and why transformers set the repair timeline.
- 🕯️ What a household actually needs – water, temperature, sanitation and medication, then fuel, light, communication, cash and transport.
- 🧲 Ten effects of an electromagnetic pulse – the documented history, the physics, and a note on how certain each effect is.
- 🗓️ A century of blackouts, tabulated – sixty years of documented events, and what the record does and does not show.
- 🧭 What the evidence supports – a closing assessment that separates established fact from inference and from speculation.
Cyber intrusion, physical sabotage and geomagnetic disturbance are handled by separate departments with separate budgets, yet all three converge on one object: a network of copper and steel synchronised to sixty cycles per second, carrying very little spare capacity. The sections below follow that object from its mechanics to its failure modes to the ordinary household standing at the end of the chain.
How a Blackout Spreads, and Why Transformers Set the Timeline
North America runs on three electrical islands that barely interact: an Eastern Interconnection reaching from the Rockies to the Atlantic, a Western Interconnection covering the mountain states and the Pacific coast, and a smaller Texas system, ERCOT, which keeps itself deliberately separate. A handful of direct-current ties connect them, each carrying a fraction of total load.
Inside each island the arrangement is denser: roughly four hundred and fifty thousand miles of high-voltage transmission, in the order of five and a half million miles of distribution, about fifty-five thousand substations, more than seven thousand generating plants, and – the figure that governs everything downstream – something near two thousand large power transformers rated above a hundred megavolt-amperes.
Alternating current at sixty hertz is a continuously corrected equilibrium. Every generator on an interconnection turns in near-perfect synchrony with every other, and the shared frequency tells each machine whether supply is ahead of demand or behind it. Operators hold frequency within a few hundredths of a hertz of sixty.
When supply and demand diverge badly enough, protective relays disconnect pre-arranged blocks of load – deliberately darkening some customers to save the remainder – and if the divergence continues, generators begin tripping in self-defence, which removes supply and drags frequency lower still. The 2003 event removed sixty-one thousand megawatts from the Eastern Interconnection in a few minutes.
Two properties of this equilibrium have changed in ways that reduce margin. Inertia is the first. A heavy spinning rotor resists sudden frequency change the way a loaded truck resists sudden braking, and the coal and nuclear plants that supplied most of that mass are retiring. Solar, wind and batteries are connected through power electronics and have no rotating mass unless programmed to emulate it, which modern equipment does competently but which alters the system’s reflexes.
The second is the disappearance of slack. For most of the twentieth century, generating capacity grew ahead of demand. Since roughly 2022 the relationship has inverted in the United States, driven by data centres, electrified heating, electric vehicles and onshore manufacturing. The queue of projects waiting to connect has at points exceeded two terawatts of proposed capacity, and only a fraction clears each year.
Introduce an adversary and four categories of attack become relevant. They differ in likelihood, in what they damage, and in how well they have been tested.
- Cyber intrusion. Demonstrated at national scale. In December 2015, a coordinated attack on three Ukrainian distribution companies opened breakers remotely and left roughly two hundred and twenty-five thousand customers without power, with operators reduced to re-closing substations by hand. Malware named Industroyer followed a year later, speaking industrial protocols directly; a variant called Industroyer2 was used against the Ukrainian transmission operator in 2022.
- Physical sabotage. The template was set on the morning of 16 April 2013, when riflemen near San Jose, California, fired into a Pacific Gas and Electric substation, disabled seventeen transformers, cut fibre-optic cables in an underground vault, and withdrew before dawn. Repair took twenty-seven days and roughly fifteen million dollars.
- Coordinated hybrid attack. The GridEx scenario. Cyber operators degrade the monitoring and control systems that tell humans what is happening; physical teams then damage substations chosen because they hold the rest together. The two effects compound, because operators are partly blind exactly when they most need to see.
- Electromagnetic and geomagnetic assault. A high-altitude burst, or an unlucky coronal mass ejection, drives quasi-direct currents through long conductors, saturating transformer cores and heating them internally.
Restoration in the first three cases depends less on the wires than on the transformers. A large power transformer is closer to a bespoke building than to a commodity: each unit is designed for its site, with its own voltage ratio, impedance, cooling class, seismic rating and transport dimensions.
Cores are stacked from grain-oriented electrical steel, produced in a small number of plants worldwide, and windings are wound under the supervision of experienced operators whose global number is small enough to be treated as a strategic constraint. A finished unit weighs between two hundred and four hundred tonnes and travels on a Schnabel car, a specialised wagon that clamps the transformer into its own frame and lets it hang between the rails, because the load is taller than the loading gauge.
Delivery times have lengthened sharply since 2020. Wood Mackenzie’s procurement surveys put standard power transformers at around one hundred and twenty-eight weeks and generator step-up transformers at around one hundred and forty-four weeks, and by early 2026 lead times for the largest units had pushed past one hundred and sixty weeks, with tier-one manufacturers quoting forty-eight to sixty months.
A utility that loses a large unit today does not place an order; it joins a queue. Three documented events show what a small trigger can do. On 9 November 1965, a mis-set protective relay near Niagara blacked out thirty million people across the north-eastern United States and Ontario for up to thirteen hours. On 13 July 1977, a lightning strike in Westchester County, compounded by operator error, darkened New York City for up to twenty-five hours.
On 14 August 2003, a sagging conductor touching a tree in Ohio, combined with a failed alarm system in one company’s control room, cascaded across eight states and Ontario and left fifty-five million people without power for up to two days.
The 2003 sequence is the closest thing to a dress rehearsal the Eastern Interconnection has had. The chain ran for more than an hour while the control room was effectively blind. By the time operators understood the situation, collapse had become irreversible. Restoration took days in places not because the damage was severe – most of it was not – but because restarting a dead grid is a slow, sequential process.
That process has a name. Black start. Bringing power back means forming small islands of generation from units capable of starting without external supply – hydroelectric plants, certain gas turbines with on-site starting capability, a limited number of others – then growing each island by adding load in blocks while matching generation to it, and finally synchronising islands together.
NERC designates a modest number of black-start resources per interconnection, and the procedure is rehearsed because it is unforgiving. When equipment is intact, black start is measured in hours to a couple of days. When equipment is damaged, the constraint changes.
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