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.
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.
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.
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