14 hours as an actual Sinluz: The strange experience of the great electricity blackout in Spain –

Note to readers: Elden Ring’s Tarnished are called “Sinluz” (sans light) in Spain.

Yesterday, 28 April 2025, at 12:33 noon, the Spanish electricity grid suddenly lost 15 gigawatts of power, equivalent to approximately 60% of the entire demand of the Spanish territory, in just five seconds. This resulted in what is already known as “The Great Blackout“, a period of “absolute zero” without any electricity supply that lasted most of the day and, depending on the region, even into the night.

The blackout left the entire Iberian Peninsula, about 60 million people, without electricity and therefore also without access to the internet or phone networks, completely cut off from communication. Due to the peculiarities of island systems and continental connections, this included all of Portugal (and the south of France, according to some sources), but excluded the Canary and Balearic Islands. It is said that the Iberian power outage acted as a firewall, containing the contagion of the energy disaster to other countries in the rest of Europe.

At the time of publication of this piece (network stability allowing), we still do not know the causes. We do know the intermediate ones, such as “a large power swing”, but not what actually caused it in the first place. In the absence of the whole truth, as much as I am crammed with various political and social reflections among other thoughts, I can only recapitulate what happened and how we felt about it.

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I think there were two very natural reactions that were replicated in many parts of the map. The first, at least in our case, was fear. To put it bluntly. I can disguise it as “annoyance”, “unease”, or “concern”, but the first thing that came to my mind when I realised that the scale of the attack transcended the regional to the multinational was, also in all its literacy, that it was an attack. And we all must be cautious not to pass on this possibility to others, but one does not need to have watched Live Free or Die Hard to know what a total blackout can imply, what it can be used for, or what can come next. Especially in the current geopolitical situation.

In a matter of minutes, it was impossible to contact anyone. No war had started (yet another), no volcano had erupted (yet another), no pandemic had broken out (yet another), but land transport was beginning to suffer serious disruptions: trains stopped in the middle of nowhere and traffic lights went out in the heart of major cities. One workmate could not hear from his son, who was camping in Granada. Another of his wife, worried that she might go into labour. Nor could I hear about my mother with reduced mobility, who would soon be returning from Valencia. In the end, these cases were minor when you think of the people who had a surgery or an emergency in hospital at that time. Or those who spent hours isolated in a lift, in the metro underground or on top of a scaffolding. Or, as seems the most widespread consequence, the more than 35,000 passengers that the emergency services had to rescue from stopped trains.

It seemed that nothing serious was happening, but the disconnection gave the feeling that it could happen, and that was enough. The second reaction, once the situation had been assumed, was one of ridiculous amazement at how much we depend on being connected. To both the electricity grid and the internet. That we turn on the switches of the lights that don’t come on when we go into bathrooms and bedrooms is almost endearing, funny, but not so much that we look at our cell phones to a greater or lesser extent. Not just to check “if it’s back yet”, but as a kind of OCD, already in the throes of abstinence syndrome.

Maybe this forced disconnection teaches us something. That is what I wanted to get at today, and what I want to conclude with below. Perhaps, and this is more likely, we long to return to what we had a few hours before, to our consensual dependence, to our mini-doses of dopamine. And all forgotten.

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So passed the hours of a strange day. People overreacting, with every right in the world given the uncertainty and the two previous points, carrying jugs of water, loaves of bread and tins of sardines. As if some European leader had recommended that we stockpile for several days. People, lots of people, who were doing something very healthy on such a hot spring day: going out. On. The. Street. More people than ever in parks and squares, for once really taking advantage of the occasion.

All in all, a rarefied air. At times, similar to the air one breathed, pardon the analogy, when going out into the outside world in the harshest days of lockdown during the pandemic. As if the colours were different, as if you hadn’t noticed that tree, that pavement, that shop before. As if they weren’t there to begin with.

Meanwhile, navigating a sea of fake news and misinformation. With no data, I went down to the car to listen to the analogue radio. Neighbours and other groups had shared in a fleeting post-blackout communication that this was already affecting southern Italy, and even Germany. On the street or acquaintances were already talking about “half of Europe”. Will I be able to travel to the Comicon in Naples in two days, given the status of trains? “They have just evacuated the entire Atocha station in Madrid”. And the food and medicines in the fridge? All spoiled. The mind searched for the immediate information and constant impacts that the social networks fix from the mobile phone, but only found a sort of broken telephone game and, once again, a combination of worry and understandable upset. “And how can I inform Gamereactor’s Danish headquarters of what is really happening to their Spanish employees?” “Come on, I have to write something offline on my laptop so I don’t waste the day” “How about I play some Mario Kart on Switch, which has battery life left?”

Luckily, Red Eléctrica did what it promised it would do at around 15:00 and the outage lasted 6 to 10 hours from that point, just before it started to mess with people’s heads too much. Because we know from very recent examples of the impact of tension and nerves on social behaviour, however exemplary it seems to have been as a general rule yesterday.

Until 2:00 AM we had no networks in Ciudad Real, so the end of the day and the fall of the night were lived in complete blackout. Stress and anxiety began to give way as talk of “percentage recovered” and “back to normal” was heard on the old transistor. We were still hooked, involuntarily reaching for the mobile phone to “check something”, but a higher hand was beginning to hold us back. The sky was beginning to be covered with stars, cleaner and brighter than ever. It is amazing how such a small city can taint such a beautiful view with light pollution. I felt like strolling through the streets in complete darkness, climbing up the hill to see the historic, hopefully unrepeatable sight.

But then, the two candles we had on the living room table as the only constant source of light in the whole house caught my attention. The mind wanted its share of after-dinner television as something necessary that is not really necessary, but the archaic and minimalist solution, warm and flickering, made an unexpected call for calm. A sudden opportunity for reflection and meditation. A moment of almost involuntary relaxation. A different, welcome sense of sleep. A reminder and a warning to the Sinluz I will have forgotten by tonight.