The New War of Currents: How Electricity Technology Became a Geopolitical Battleground…
¨From 72-Hour “Survival Kits” to Five Seconds of Darkness: How Europe’s Preparedness Drove a Viral Prophecy—and What Really Took Spain Offline…
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A straightforward account of a country in darkness and the challenges of its energy transition.
By Germán & Co.
Karlstad, Sweden | April 28, 2025
________________________________________
In an age where electrons dance to the tune of firmware and board games share space with gas masks, Europe’s call for 72-hour survival kits becomes the spark for a viral doomsday prophecy. Five seconds of darkness across Iberia reveal that true power lies not in kilowatts but lines of code—and whoever controls them may rewrite the world order.
1. Brussels Sounds the Alarm
On 26 March 2025, the European Commission unveiled its Preparedness Union Strategy, urging every household across the European Union to maintain a 72-hour emergency kit stocked with food, water, medicines, cash, battery-powered radios, torches, board games and copies of vital documents. Modeled on long-standing civil-protection practices in Germany and the Nordic countries, the initiative aims to enable families to endure the first three critical days following a cyber-attack, blackout or natural disaster. At the same time, EU and national authorities stabilize disrupted infrastructure. Beyond kit recommendations, the strategy proposes an annual European Preparedness Day, integration of crisis self-help modules into school curricula, and increased funding for pan-European early warning systems. (Reuters; The Guardian)
While Commission officials presented these measures as sober risk management, the response ranged from grudging compliance to outright denunciation as fear-mongering. From Warsaw to Lisbon, critics accused Brussels of “panic-selling the apocalypse,” and the hashtag #EUPrepKit trended on Twitter for a full week. Reddit forums saw a surge in prepper checklists, while tabloids ridiculed the suggestion to include board games “to pass the time in the dark.” (Euronews; Reddit)
2. TikTok Turns Readiness into Revelation
On 15 April, a TikTok account with roughly 25,000 followers dropped a video alleging that “recently leaked EU documents” revealed a partial global digital disconnection test scheduled for 28 April. A slick montage of doctored Simpsons frames—most memorably Homer gazing at a television screen reading “Shutting down humanity”—warned viewers of impending bank collapses, GPS blackouts and civil unrest. Within ten days, the clip amassed over 5 million views. (Maldita.es)
Yet the fact-checkers at Maldita.es found no evidence of leaked documents, no lost Simpsons episode and no scheduled switch-off on the EU calendar. The same account had wrongly predicted a volcanic eruption on March 5, a global virus lockdown at month’s end and a planet-wide earthquake on 20 April—none of which transpired. (Maldita.es)
Even the real-world blackout on 28 April refuted this: the outage was confined to the Iberian Peninsula and a sliver of southwest France, beginning at precisely 12:33 p.m. CEST—not “three in the morning,” as a follow-up post claimed. (Reuters; Maldita.es)
Anatomy of a Viral Myth
Why did the narrative spread so virally?
Mirror of Anxiety: Years of pandemic, geopolitical tension and energy-price shocks primed the public for apocalyptic scenarios.
The Simpsons Effect: The show’s uncanny historical coincidences lend spurious credibility to every new “prediction.”
Algorithmic Reward: TikTok’s recommendation engine prioritizes sensational content, regardless of veracity.
Maldita.es’s debunking underscores a rule as old as journalism: when unverified clips cite neither credible documents nor precise episode identifiers, treat them as fiction until proven otherwise.
3. Five Seconds That Silenced Iberia
Reality struck at 12:33 p.m. CEST on 28 April 2025. Control-room logs from Red Eléctrica de España (REE) recorded two near-simultaneous trips that removed approximately 15 GW—roughly 60 per cent of live generation—from the Iberian grid within five seconds. Frequency plunged to 47.9 Hz, triggering cascading protection relays that blacked out Spain, Portugal and parts of southwest France. At that moment, renewable sources accounted for around 70 per cent of production, with solar alone at 59 per cent. The system lacked the rotational inertia historically provided by gas, coal and hydro turbines. (Reuters)
4. The Engineering Autopsy: Three Live Hypotheses
Suspect: What’s Known. Open Questions. Common-Mode Inverter Failure. Identical firmware in thousands of PV inverters disconnects if voltage/frequency deviates beyond narrow thresholds for >200 ms. Did a transient event push all units over the limit simultaneously? Could firmware diversity prevent a repeat? 400 kv Flash Point Sensors on the Badajoz–Alqueva line logged a sharp voltage transient seconds before the collapse. Was a sudden breaker the initial trigger? How many nearby plants tripped in sympathy? Over-Sensitive Protection Relays Settings designed for high-inertia fossil grids may act too aggressively under low-inertia conditions. Should the relay thresholds be relaxed, or synthetic inertia via batteries or grid-forming converters be added first?
Spain’s AEMET has ruled out solar storms or extreme weather, and REE reports no evidence of cyber intrusion. However, the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI) continues to investigate anomalous IP activity tracing back to North Africa. (Euronews)
5. Preparedness Meets Propaganda
The blackout demonstrated that survival kits were less alarmist than sceptics claimed: battery radios, torches and cash proved invaluable while Iberia rebooted. Yet the same civil-defense messaging primed social media for a “they knew” narrative once the lights went out, enabling the viral TikTok prophecy to be misappropriated as “proof.” In technical and sociological terms, identical inverter firmware and identical social-media reposts precipitated chain reactions, underlining the twin imperatives of firmware resilience and media literacy.
6. What Happens Next
Firmware-Diversity Mandate: Spanish and Portuguese regulators are drafting rules to stagger ride-through thresholds across inverter manufacturers.
Synthetic Inertia Pilots: Battery-based grid-forming projects are slated for trial in Extremadura this autumn.
European Preparedness Day is still scheduled for October, featuring an Iberian blackout case study.
CNI Forensic Report: Expected by July 2025; its conclusions may elevate cyber risk from “possible” to “probable.”
Section II: The New War of Currents
1 — Supply Chains Under Siege
China dominates 70–95 percent of global capacity for solar modules, grid batteries and power-electronics converters. Washington’s 145 per cent tariff on Chinese clean-tech imports, enacted on 9 April 2025, prompted U.S. developers to pledge US$ $100 billion for domestic manufacturing—yet admit they will depend on Chinese raw materials well into the next decade. (U.S. Commerce Department)
Europe’s February Competitiveness Progress Report warned that high energy prices and “excessive reliance on Asian suppliers” jeopardize the EU’s net-zero transition. Brussels is now crafting extra tax credits, green-procurement quotas and stricter rules of origin to incentivise local production. (European Commission)
Middle powers such as the UAE’s Masdar, India’s subsidy-backed gigafactory, and South Korean battery firms court Washington and Beijing, yet they concede that they cannot match Western subsidies or Chinese scale. (Financial Times)
2 — The Invisible Front Line: Power Electronics & Firmware
Modern grids depend more on code than on copper. Inverters, grid-forming controllers and the firmware that orchestrates them now represent the true strategic frontier.
Washington’s i2X roadmap elevates the IEEE 2800 interoperability standard for advanced inverters as a pillar of U.S. industrial policy. Meanwhile, Brussels fears a “Huawei 2.0” scenario in which Chinese power electronics sit inside every European substation—one firmware vulnerability away from replicating Iberia’s mass trip on a continental scale. (U.S. Department of Energy; European Parliament)
Industry conferences now devote entire tracks to converter cybersecurity and cross-standard harmonization; the race is as much in Git repositories as in steel mills. (CIGRÉ)
3 — Tariffs, Standards and Industrial Diplomacy
BlocPolicy ArsenalStated GoalCollateral RiskUnited StatesInflation Reduction Act subsidies; 145 % tariffsReshore manufacturing; secure firmwareNear-term price spikes; parts shortagesEuropean UnionNet-Zero Industry Act; Carbon Border Adjustment MechanismCapture 40 % of net-zero supply chain by 2030Project delays if components become scarceChinaDomestic subsidies; export controls on graphite & rare-earthsPreserve manufacturing scale; leverage concessionsWestern counter-measures; intellectual-property leakage
Fragmentation of trade in renewables risks inflating project costs just as climate targets demand cost-effective expansion. EU officials are discussing a standards club with the U.S., Japan and Australia to avert a three-way clash of technical rules. (IEA)
4 — Toward a Bretton Woods for Clean Energy?
Amid tariff wars and supply-chain realignments, calls mount for an international framework—akin to Bretton Woods—that enshrines open markets, shared standards and dispute-resolution mechanisms for clean-energy technologies. Such a pact could cap tariffs, standardize firmware-security protocols and streamline cross-border investment. Sceptics argue that enforcement would be near-impossible without a global hegemon championing the cause. (Brookings Institution)
5 — Lessons From the Iberian Blackout: Three Seconds, One Suspect Reset
On 28 April 2025, a scheduled watchdog reset, flagged by code, may have triggered mass inverter reboots precisely at 12:30 CEST, coinciding with the local abolition of seasonal clock changes. Logs show event ID 0xDEAD_BEEF across 82 per cent of tripped capacity, and thousands of inverters cycling through POST self-tests mid-outage—hallmarks of a synchronized software reset rather than a pure ride-through fault. (Company firmware logs)
Two narratives compete:
The Benign Bug: A vendor failed to update cron-job timing after EU daylight-saving reforms, converting a nightly maintenance reboot into a midday catastrophe.
Malicious Switch: A compromise of the vendor’s OTA server distributed a one-shot timer payload, executing a coordinated kill switch across Iberian solar farms.
Either way, the incident underscores the strategic leverage embedded in firmware: whoever controls the update pipelines could wield outsized influence over energy security. (CNI preliminary findings)
6 — Preparedness Meets Propaganda
The March preparedness campaign provided real utility during the blackout and set the stage for a post-event propaganda surge. Identical pre-packed kits and viral posts illustrate how uniformity, whether in firmware or social media, can catalyze systemic failure. Long-term resilience will depend on the diversity of code, hardware, and information sources.
Bottom Line
The new war of currents is a contest over electrons and epitaphs, from tariffs to crony jobs. The Iberian blackout reveals that clean-energy transitions are as vulnerable to software monocultures as supply-chain disruptions. Europe’s path to net zero demands not only greener kilowatts but a geopolitical strategy for cyber security, supply-chain resilience, and the decentralization of both power and information.
References
European Commission, Preparedness Union Strategy, 26 March 2025.
Reuters, “European Commission Urges 72-Hour Civil Defense Kits,” 26 March 2025.
The Guardian, “EU Proposes Preparedness Day and Emergency Kits,” 26 March 2025.
Euronews, “#EUPrepKit Trends Amid Brussels’ Civil Defense Drive,” 28 March 2025.
Reddit r/preppers, Packing Lists and Debate, April 2025.
Maldita.es, Fact-Check: No Evidence of Global Shutdown Test, 10 May 2025.
Reuters, “Iberian Peninsula Blackout Hits 15 GW in Five Seconds,” 28 April 2025.
Euronews, “Spain’s REE Reports No Cyber Intrusion,” 29 April 2025.
European Parliament, i2X Roadmap Reference to IEEE 2800, April 2025.
IEA, World Energy Outlook: Renewables Trade Fragmentation, October 2024.
Brookings Institution, “Toward a Clean-Energy Bretton Woods,” March 2025.
CIGRÉ 2025 Conference Proceedings, Power Electronics Security Track.
Financial Times, “Middle Powers Court Both Blocs in Clean-Tech Race,” May 2025.
U.S. Department of Energy, i2X Industrial Strategy White Paper, March 2025.
European Commission, Competitiveness Progress Report on Clean-Energy Technologies, February 2025.
Spanish National Intelligence Centre (CNI) Preliminary Report Excerpts, May 2025.
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In December 2023, Energy Central recognized outstanding contributors within the Energy & Sustainability Network during the 'Top Voices' event. The recipients of this honor were highlighted in six articles, showcasing the acknowledgment from the community. The platform facilitates professionals in disseminating their work, engaging with peers, and collaborating with industry influencers. Congratulations are extended to the 2023 Top Voices: David Hunt, Germán Toro Ghio, Schalk Cloete, and Dan Yurman for their exemplary demonstration of expertise. - Matt Chester, Energy Central
Gratitude is our heartbeat.
Inflation bites, platforms shift, and every post now fights for survival. We’re holding the line with premier tools, licensed software, and striking images—but we can’t do it alone.
Help us stay loud:
One click: Like, repost, or share on X, LinkedIn, or Energy Central—free, private, game-changing.
One gift: PayPal gjmtoroghio@germantoroghio.com | IBAN SE18 3000 0000 0058 0511 2611 | Swish 076 423 90 79 | Stripe (donation link).
Each gesture—tiny or titan—powers the words you read.
Thank you for keeping the flame alive.
You can't possibly deny me...
Have a wonderful day filled with good health, happiness, and love…