In The Blind Spot – Blackout Bragaddocio

COMMENT: ElMundo doesn’t do anything more than hypothesise. However, when a large and prestigious Spanish daily explicitly speculates on such a sensitive topic, it tends to suggest editorial certainty. The suggestion is dramatic: the blackouts were caused by a short-term attempt at political point-scoring. But does it capture the whole story? 

The proof is almost undeniable. Like most energy grids, vast energy reserves are typically scheduled for the work week, whilst they mildly lower the available power reserves on weekends. 

Not so in Blackout Spain. Whereas on Sunday, April 27, the grid operator counted on at least 20 gas and nuclear energy plants, along with all the inertia-providing stabilisation these provide, by Monday 28 only 10 were available. This means that, according to data obtained by ElMundo, Spain’s conventional energy supply was more than halved. Some of the data points to even poorer shielding: 

“Red Electrica barely used six of its combined cycle plants of the seven it had planned to use that day due to so-called ‘technical restrictions’. It’s a third of what the institution tends to use as a supply shield. The previous day, a Sunday of reduced demand, it had counted on at least 16 plants.” 

The cherry on top of ElMundo’s theory is that, on Monday, April 28, Sanchez was to host a reunion titled Invest in Spain, before almost 80 multinational corporations. Could the dramatic lowering of available conventional energy sources have been timed for an executive announcement on the widespread use of renewable energy in the Spanish grid?

Isn’t it a fascinating coincidence? ElMundo certainly seems to think it is — while stopping just short of saying so. 

But I’m not sure this explains the whole story just yet. 

The Blind Spot is a small and niche publication. In many ways, this is our strength because, unlike papers such as ElMundo, we have a freer hand to analyse. And, as my front-line experience revealed, the blackout mystery is far from being solved, all the more so because of how quickly the world, and Spain, seems to have moved on from what seemed to me, for a short while at least, like the end of the world. I wish I were exaggerating — check out my piece on living through the blackout. 

This experience ran contrary to the majority of alternative media on X/Twitter, which confidently suggested the blackouts were due to the prevalence of solar power in the Spanish energy grid.

These accounts claimed that solar energy does not benefit from spinning rotators with inertia, unlike conventional energy sources. The rotational inertia of these conventional energy generators means they can stabilise the grid frequency during sudden disturbances or drops in supply. Without it, the grid becomes more sensitive to fluctuations. 

Online, the experts were vehement. The dramatic 60% drop in energy supply in Spain was because solar power’s lack of inertia meant it was incapable of dealing with small offsets in demand, causing system-wide imbalances after minor changes in supply that wouldn’t have affected conventional energy networks. 

As this story practically confirms, this angle was akin to claiming a large wildfire is caused by the accumulation of dried vegetation. It may have helped the wildfire spread dramatically, but it couldn’t have been the cause. 

But who was I to argue against the experts? Well, I was a local. I lived through it. And you’ll always learn more from a firsthand seat at the action than studying the event from afar. 

What these accounts missed about the blackout is how dodgy it was.

The blackouts shouldn’t be an opportunity for an easy-point score against solar power. Instead, it should be an invitation to dig deeper into the most dramatic energy scandal everyone has seemingly forgotten about. 

Read my piece. You’ll note I pointed out that, just after the grid went down — around 12:30, and just before the telephone networks fell, texts amongst my father’s colleagues indicated that Japan and Germany’s networks had also collapsed. 

This was quickly debunked once the radio stations recovered their signal and reassured locals the energy collapse was isolated to the Spanish peninsula.

That’s when the radio hosts started to receive information as to what had gone wrong. The first explanation, spread far and wide by Spanish radio, was that a large fire in the south of France may have severed one of the Iberian peninsula’s only connections with the outside world’s energy grid. This imbalance may have created a domino effect, which knocked the Spanish grid offline. We weren’t to worry — they expected the energy to return in a few hours. Reports of certain neighbourhoods in Malaga or Seville regaining power started trickling in, as did hope. 

Then we received a second explanation, which was far more worrisome. Coming some hours later, it was from the Portuguese energy operator. Chills went through my spine as the now-worried radio hosts claimed that rare atmospheric oscillations had caused critical damage to the Iberian energy grid and that it may take weeks — not hours — to recover energy. In a one-two combo, the Spanish intelligence services then claimed they were ‘not discarding’ a cyberattack just yet. 

Alas, all of these explanations were practically forgotten in the Spanish press after we regained power, the media space being used to process the drama unfolding at the Spanish electrical operator, as they proved unable to adopt a cogent explanation for the blackouts. Practically none of these furtive explanations had any air time in the coming days in the international press. 

Why? Well, they were all fake. 

That’s right — all of the stories the locals received on our radio stations were fake. 

Not only did a fire not cause a breakdown in the Spanish-French electricity supply, the fire never existed.

The Portuguese energy operator denied it had ever put out a statement about rare atmospheric oscillations. 

And the CNI later denied the event was caused by a cyberattack. 

Some news outlets have framed this in a typical manner, complaining about how far fake news can travel these days. But these were no ordinary fake news. The Portuguese notice about atmospheric oscillations was printed in practically every major newspaper around the world. The CNI itself was the one who put out the statement on a cyberattack. All of them were widely and repeatedly noted by all Spanish radio operators at the time of the blackout.

This wasn’t amateur hour. It reeks of state-sponsored misdirection. Especially because the post-facto positivity which flooded social media, showing all sorts of spontaneous dancing and parties, clashed so jarringly with me and my friend’s experience of the event. Fun didn’t prevail: fear did. And could you blame us? At one point, we were told by the only news outlets we still had that the blackouts could continue for weeks. We all quietly agreed on our fortunes: everyone had mentally prepared for a night of crime. 

So what am I to say when I hear these comments by ElMundo? If it truly were an executive-led mess, I wouldn’t put it past the Spanish government to intentionally mislead us away from a bad case of environmental braggadocio. 

Sanchez’s government in Spain is not what it used to be. A long stay in power guarantees the enmeshing of executive-based power structures in supposedly independent bodies of the Spanish state. We heard from a reliable source three weeks ago that Spanish national police has a unit stationed in the El Escorial area of Madrid whose purpose, in a blatant breach of legality, is to collect blackmail on prominent politicians and public figures in Spain for our executive branch. This means I can put nothing past Pedro Sanchez’s government, whose power smarts and cunning would put Frank Underwood to shame, the very embodiment of Izzy’s ‘in power or in prison’ dynamic. 

Alas, I can’t say ElMundo’s angle fully explains the confusing news I experienced on that day.

Not only because we’re still in the dark as to what happened when one of the world’s wealthiest countries dramatically lost all of its power in seconds, months after the fact. 

The problem goes further than that: nobody seems to be asking the right questions. 

COMMENT: Almost like clockwork, two of The Blind Spot’s predictions about Saudi Arabia have come true in quick succession. 

The first was the legalisation of alcohol in over 600 designated locations, beginning in 2026 — a long-anticipated shift in the Kingdom’s notoriously restrictive alcohol policy. While The Blind Spot had been informed of these licenses being prepared in 2023, we had also been told their delay was being timed to begin after the King’s death, out of respect to his seniority. 

And considering the King of Saudi Arabia was conspicuously absent during Donald Trump’s visit to the Kingdom, the news bodes ominously for the Saudi administration’s perspective on the King’s life expectancy.

The second confirmation we certainly didn’t expect was the rise of an extremist, Islamist youth movement against the dynasty of al-Saud, only a week after news of the alcohol licenses was made public. 

This youth-led group calls itself “The Free Masked”, and claims it is a popular movement that sharply criticises MBS’s policies that curtailed the speech of Islamic scholars and clerics while spending on modernisation projects like NEOM. 

As we had suggested in January: 

But Saudi Arabia’s position as the birthplace of Islam means I believe these reforms put MBS in a precarious position, despite their current popularity. And the threat won’t necessarily come from old-fashioned conservative Wahhabis.

Counter-intuitively, if the recent history of developed countries is anything to go by, a modern future for Saudi Arabia could turn its young men away from liberalism.

And the hypothetical alt-right Saudi Arabian young men’s idealized past won’t be in distant histories, unlike their equivalents in the West. And unlike in the West, they will have coherent reasons to reimpose this nostalgic vision: Saudi is the birthplace of Islamic law.

This perspective came after I accidentally happened upon some TikToks last year by young British-educated Saudis who denounced MBS’s invitation of Iggy Azalea to a Riyadh music festival where she twerked on stage – “In the home of the Ummah!” 

We should remind our readers that its coinciding with the alcohol decree — and Trump’s visit to the Kingdom — is likely not by chance but by design. While I don’t wish to suggest that all terrorist movements are state-backed, most of the effective ones certainly are.

Time will tell whether Free Masked emerges as a true movement in Saudi Arabia. If they do, I wouldn’t hesitate to point at the hand of European or Western intelligence agencies with a history of effectively mobilising Islamic extremists via proxy. Because an America-aligned Saudi Arabia is rendered vulnerable by its Westernisation to internal Islamic pressures.

Fostering internal rebellion is an excellent way of exercising leverage over this relationship.

COMMENT: Somehow I missed this. The story is not, of course, the thinly-veiled PR piece for the Kingdom of Morocco — filled with neutral terms like ‘destined for greatness’, ‘among the great and gilded’ and ‘liveliness’. 

Rather, it’s the combination of the increasing highlights of the Prince in the international press — courtesy of the Kingdom’s PR machine — together with hushed news of King Mohammed VI’s increasingly deteriorating health. As usual, the only place to get any critical news about Morocco is in the Spanish or Algerian press. Over the last year or so, these sources have been attesting to grave illnesses wracking the King’s body: most notably a chronic lung disease. 

While the news landscape was almost devoid of Prince Moulay Hassan’s person in 2023, 2024 saw a dramatic rise in his international press coverage. What we’re seeing is a manicured public handover in case the worst occurs – concealing a jostle in power between teams more closely aligned to a weakened Mohammed VI than the maturing Prince.