The Enigmatic Bestiary of the Blackout…
¨First, Venezuela’s blackout? The work of a rogue iguana with a vendetta against humanity and the wrong system, probably fresh off a failed audition for Sharknado 7: Reptilian Revolt. “I’ll show them ‘just a lizard’!” it hissed, while chewing through a power line like it was auditioning for Naked and Afraid: Power Grid Edition.
But wait! The plot thickens faster than a sloth on espresso. Now Spain's "eternal sun" has been extinguished by... wait for it... a lynx with a sudden craving for electrical paella. "Cables? Delicious! They taste like progress and reflect poor planning for the traditional Spanish cocido!" growled the lynx, who is now reportedly in talks with Netflix for Bird Box 2: Furry Grid Crash.
So, to recap: No aliens. Earth’s wildlife is going whole Ocean’s 11 on our power grids. Next up? A koala has taken out Australia’s internet by mistaking fiber optics for eucalyptus. Stay tuned, folks…
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Don't worry, my friend! Even though I am a reptile and you are a big cat, we are both part of this beautiful world and have our own value. Let's respect our differences!
By Germán & Co.
Karlstad, Sweden | May 2, 2025
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I. The bestiary of the blackout
A half‑scorched iguana, a kamikaze vervet monkey, a weasel incinerated in the bowels of CERN, legions of electrocuted North‑American squirrels, nesting crows dismantling Tokyo’s overhead lines, an Iberian lynx reputed to fancy photovoltaic cabling—our era has no shortage of quadruped “terrorists” and feathered “saboteurs.” With every spectacular outage, social networks reel off the same pantomime: pictures of the unlucky beast, ironic hashtags and, invariably, the insinuation that the animal kingdom has opened a new front in its millennial resistance to the human techno‑sphere.
The surreal procession would be merely entertaining were it not for the political expediency that often accompanies it. In March 2019, when Venezuela descended into its worst blackout on record, officials floated the theory of an “iguana attack” on the high‑voltage lines that fan out from the Guri hydroelectric complex. Their narrative evaporated under the weight of subsequent investigations pointing to untrimmed vegetation, neglected backup plants and chronic under‑investment—but the reptilian scapegoat lingered in the collective imagination.
Months later and half a world away, Kenya Power attributed a four‑hour nationwide outage to “a monkey falling on a transformer.” In Switzerland, technicians at the Large Hadron Collider located the remains of a marten in a sub‑station after the accelerator tripped. Each episode re‑animated a folkloric dramaturgy in which non‑human actors, possessed of obscure motives, are recast as antagonists in the human pursuit of progress.
Yet the zoological spin, however comical, performs a serious ideological function: it displaces responsibility from systems to creatures, from political choices to accidents of nature. The Caracas iguana provided a ready‑made foil for an administration anxious to divert attention from decades of maintenance neglect; the Kenyan vervet monkey allowed the utility to avoid uncomfortable questions about grid redundancy. In each case, the anecdote imagines collapse as an act of external malice rather than an immanent property of brittle infrastructure.
II. Iberia’s hour of darkness
At 12:17 p.m. on Monday, 28 April 2025, electricity frequency monitors across the Iberian Peninsula registered a violent wobble. Within five seconds, the Spanish grid had ejected an estimated 15 gigawatts—roughly 60 per cent of national demand—as photovoltaic inverters, wind turbines and finally two nuclear reactors disconnected in self‑defence. Trains stopped between stations; lifts froze between floors; data centres flipped to diesel generators.
By nightfall, supply had been restored to 99 per cent of consumers, but the symbolism of Europe’s renewables poster child plunged into darkness could not be more charged. WIRED
In the first 24 hours, blame ricocheted between ministries, grid operator Red Eléctrica de España (REE), and the major utilities. The conservative daily ABC leaked correspondence showing that, six days earlier, energy companies had warned REE of “anomalies of the same nature” as those that would later cascade through the system—warnings the operator answered only after three days, with a laconic assurance that “all parameters remain within norms. ”Diario ABCDiario ABC
Government spokespeople, anxious to shield the green agenda on which Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has staked his legacy, denounced “lies” linking the blackout to high shares of solar and wind. Euronews, Reuters and Wired offered more measured accounts: the fault appeared to originate in “two abrupt disconnections of generation” one‑and‑a‑half seconds apart, triggering protection relays faster than human operators could react.
While investigations unfold, one technical detail is beyond dispute. At noon on 28 April, solar photovoltaics supplied 60 per cent of the Iberian load, yet fewer than 3 per cent of those megawatts enjoyed local battery support. When the first inverter sensed a frequency excursion and dropped out, the others obeyed their firmware and followed suit; in the absence of spinning steel to damp the perturbation, the frequency nose‑dived, forcing nuclear and wind units to trip on under‑frequency protection. Within moments, Spain experienced, at a continental scale, what engineers describe as “grid‑forming collapse.”
III. From inertia to electronics: anatomy of a fragile transition
Electrical grids evolved for a century around the principle of synchronous rotation: the same turbines that produce power also embody kinetic energy, acting as a flywheel that smooths perturbations. A standard‑issue 1 GW turbo‑alternator stores roughly 3,000 megajoules in its rotor—a mechanical buffer that grants operators precious seconds to stabilise disturbances.
Photovoltaics, in contrast, inject direct current converted to alternating current by solid‑state inverters that possess no inertia of their own. Once equipped with fixed‑speed induction generators, wind turbines now predominantly use doubly‑fed or full‑converter systems that likewise decouple blade inertia from grid frequency. In theory, inverters can be programmed to emulate inertia (“virtual synchronous machines”) or to form voltage and frequency autonomously, but the requisite software and oversized power electronics add cost. Like most jurisdictions, Spain has preferred the cheaper “grid‑following” design, leaving the task of frequency regulation to whatever synchronous fleet remains online.
The April blackout, therefore, dramatises a contradiction at the heart of the European Green Deal: the race to pack ever more variable renewables into a system whose stabilising scaffolding—hydro reservoirs, gas turbines, nuclear rotors—shrinks under the pressure of climate policy and market liberalisation. Between 2010 and 2025, the Iberian Peninsula retired 9.3 GW of coal; gas plants that now run at capacity factors below 15 per cent, their fixed costs recouped through “capacity payments” that satisfy accountants but not turbine manufacturers. Two of Spain’s seven nuclear units were in long‑scheduled refuelling outages on 28 April; another pair had been inexplicably curtailed by dispatch instructions that sought to “showcase the renewables fleet,” according to industry sources quoted by ABC. Diario ABC
In other words, the blackout was neither an act of zoological sabotage nor a fluke: it was the foreseeable outcome of policy choices that allowed inverter‑dominated capacity to surge ahead of the flexibility—batteries, flywheels, pumped‑hydro, synchronous condensers—needed to anchor it.
IV. The political economy of blame
Early commentary split along ideological grooves. Conservative media emphasised “the suicidal mix” and called for an immediate moratorium on new solar farms until batteries are mandated; green NGOs accused REE of under‑investing in grid digitalisation and cross‑border interconnectors, noting that Spain’s tie‑lines to France and Portugal amount to barely 3 percent of peak load, far below the EU’s 15 percent target. WIRED
The government, committed to 81 per cent renewable electricity by 2030, framed the outage as an unfortunate but isolated hiccup. Yet the clash obscures a subtler antagonism: under liberalised electricity markets, no actor bears clear responsibility for “system inertia.” Grid operators may specify frequency‑ride‑through parameters, but they cannot compel private developers to over‑size inverters or co‑locate batteries unless regulators create new revenue streams. Likewise, merchant solar owners have no incentive to sacrifice daytime output to stabilise the grid when the pool price is at its peak.
Thus the blackout illuminates a governance vacuum: the state has retreated to a referee role, utilities have fragmented into asset‑lite generators, and consumers—told that the cheapest kilowatt‑hour is ipso facto the greenest—discover that the short‑run marginal cost of solar omits the system cost of keeping the lights on.
V. Zoology as ideology: the uses of the animal metaphor
Why, then, does the figure of the “terrorist animal” recur so persistently? Part of the answer lies in journalism’s appetite for “news of the weird,” but deeper currents are at work. First, animals furnish an external, seemingly apolitical antagonist; blaming a squirrel absolves the market reforms and state neglect. The second motif dovetails with a cultural undercurrent that anthropomorphises nature as an agent of revenge in the Anthropocene—an ecological sublime updated for the age of high‑speed connectivity.
Yet, stopping at cultural analysis would overlook the material interface between ecology and infrastructure. Power lines, photovoltaic parks, substations and fibre ducts splice the built environment into habitats, often providing micro‑niches attractive to opportunistic species. The same renewable boom that promises decarbonisation is paving deserts with reflective panels that attract curious ungulates; off‑shore wind arrays alter migratory patterns of birds and bats. In that sense, the animal incursion is not an “external shock” but the ecological feedback of territorial expansion.
VI. Comparative zoological‑technical chronicle
Incidents in which animals are blamed for disrupting critical infrastructure reveal an intriguing pattern: the shakier the governance behind the grid, the more unusual the creature pressed into service as a scapegoat.
Back in 2016, a lone vervet monkey leapt onto poorly protected equipment at a Kenyan hydroelectric station and triggered a nationwide blackout—an accident made possible by flimsy perimeter fencing and a fatal single‑point‑of‑failure design. Three years later, as Venezuela’s state utility Corpoelec staggered under sanctions, chronic under‑maintenance and politicized appointments, officials pointed to an errant iguana on an 800 kV transmission corridor to explain yet another collapse of the national system. The reptile was a convenient diversion from deeper structural decay.
Compare that with 2020, when CERN’s 400 kV substation near Geneva went offline after a curious beech marten gnawed through aging insulation. The episode was greeted with wry humour, swiftly dissected in public-facing reports, and folded into a transparent plan for hardening the site—no hand‑waving required.
Routine but revealing cases keep appearing. In 2022, a rash of squirrel contacts with overhead, uninsulated distribution feeders in the United States underscored how ordinary vegetation management lapses can still spark outages across a modern grid. The ironic rumour that an Iberian lynx might one day claw through DC cabling at a Spanish solar‑PV farm—projected for 2025—has already circulated online. The story is almost certainly apocryphal, yet its very popularity shows how people crave tidy, animal‑centric narratives while engineers wrestle with more abstract concerns such as inertia deficits and frequency stability.
Taken together, the anecdotes expose a larger truth: where technical resilience is high and institutions are transparent, animal mishaps become quirky footnotes; where systems and oversight are fragile, exotic fauna turn into convenient villains.
VII. From analogy to analysis: what Spain tells us about the global transition
Spain is hardly alone. California’s “duck curve” forced the state to procure 5 GW of four‑hour lithium‑ion storage, yet its August 2020 rolling blackouts still exposed the perils of simultaneous heatwaves and transmission constraints. South‑Australia, hailed for achieving 66 percent renewable penetration, survived a September 2016 system black thanks to emergency islanding—but only after tornado‑induced line faults cascaded through wind farm protective relays. In each case, the technical dossier reads differently. Still, the strategic diagnosis converges: as variable renewables scale beyond 40 per cent, planners must either retain enough synchronous plant to ride through disturbances or replace the mechanical inertia with fast‑responding storage.
Seven levers for a resilient transition
Mandate “grid‑forming” capability in all new inverter‑based resources above a threshold capacity, with procurement auctions that remunerate inertia as a service.
Impose on‑site storage quotas: 10–20 percent of AC rating for utility‑scale PV and wind, with minimum two‑hour duration and state‑of‑charge guarantees.
Expand synchronous condensers and flywheels in weak nodes to provide fault current and voltage support.
Re‑design protection logic: Move from binary trip thresholds to graded frequency and voltage ride‑through, coupled with local controls that modulate rather than disconnect.
Strengthen interconnection: The 3 per cent cross‑border capacity that currently links Iberia to France must quadruple to reach Nordic and Benelux levels.
Cultivate demand‑side elasticity: Dynamic tariffs and automated load shedding can share the burden of frequency regulation.
Re‑politicise grid governance: recognise inertia as a public good requiring deliberate planning, not merely the emergent property of private bids in a spot market.
VIII. The geopolitics of copper, lithium and control systems
Behind the technical prescriptions lies a geopolitical substrate. Europe’s dash for batteries depends on lithium, cobalt, and nickel extracted under social‑ecological regimes that are no less contentious than oil. The power converters that render renewables intelligible to the grid embed micro‑controllers often fabricated in East Asian foundries. And the real‑time operating systems that orchestrate frequency response run on software stacks vulnerable to zero‑day exploits; the spectre of cyber‑attack, waved away by Spanish officials, cannot be dismissed in an era when Stuxnet is public knowledge.
Thus, while the zoological metaphor distracts, the digital predator advances unseen. The Configuration Management Database of a modern sub‑station counts tens of thousands of firmware instances; a single unpatched library could, in principle, give a foreign actor leverage over entire regions. The April blackout was not a cyber‑incident—investigations so far rule out malicious code—but its clean, mechanical origin should not lull planners into complacency. A system that collapses from a benign frequency deviation will fare no better against coordinated intrusion.
IX. Ecological counter‑narratives: from enmity to coexistence
Le Monde Diplomatique has long resisted the binary of progress versus wilderness. The trope of “animal sabotage” can be inverted: non‑human agency, far from inimical, might serve as an early‑warning sensor for infrastructural fragility. In south‑eastern Brazil, researchers install acoustic recorders on transmission pylons to monitor bird colonies whose stress calls correlate with line corona discharge, a precursor of insulation failure. In Scotland, power companies deploy camera traps that identify pine marten activity and schedule preventive maintenance before chewing damage occurs. The thin line between “pest” and “sentinel” is a matter of governance, not biology.
One could imagine a Mediterranean future in which Iberian lynxes, fitted with non‑invasive GPS collars, alert grid operators to hotspots of electromagnetic interference; in which crow flight paths guide the undergrounding of vulnerable feeders; in which solar parks reserve corridors for migratory ungulates rather than ring‑fencing themselves with electrified wire that both harms fauna and collects dust.
X. Memory, accountability, and the politics of invisibility
Blackouts, unlike wars or pandemics, leave few monuments. Once lights return, the collective desire is to forget. Yet the April event joins a lineage of infrastructural breakdowns that mark the Anthropocene’s deepening contradiction: We demand ever-faster electrification to avert climate catastrophe, yet we overlook the metabolic rifts this acceleration opens in the socio‑technical fabric.
Memory work is, therefore, political: Naming the outage an act of “lynx sabotage” erases the institutional genealogy of cost‑cutting, privatisation, and lobbying that made the grid brittle. Insisting on technical nuance is to reclaim public deliberation from both sensationalism and technocratic opacity.
XI. Toward a democratic energetics
Ironically, the blackout came on the eve of Spain’s Labour Day. In Valencia, demonstrators marched under banners demanding “Energía popular, no Cortes” (People’s energy, no cuts). Their slogans gesture toward a broader democratization: not merely community ownership of renewables but participation in the protocols that govern dispatch, protection, and investment.
A democratic energetics would treat inertia and reserve margins as commons, financed by transparent and progressive tariffs rather than regressive fixed charges. It would couple redistribution with ecological repair, dedicating portions of network profit to habitat restoration around pylons and dams. And it would cultivate technical literacy, so that the next time daylight vanishes, citizens can parse telemetry charts instead of viral memes about carnivorous cables.
XII. Conclusion: from fable to praxis
Animals will continue to gnaw, perch, burrow, and nest around our machines; power lines will arc, inverters will trip, and electrons will follow the fundamental laws of physics. Whether these events lead to widespread disaster or are local issues will depend less on animal behavior and more on the redundancy, regulation, and reciprocity systems we establish.
The iguana in Guri, the weasel at CERN, and the mythical lynx of Extremadura serve as narrative devices—reflecting how societies perceive their underlying infrastructure. To eliminate the fear of "animal terrorism," we must confront our ambivalence toward the technologies that support our lives. The blackout on April 28, 2025, provides a harsh but essential lesson: pursuing decarbonization without careful planning can extinguish the very lights meant to guide us toward a sustainable future.
Therefore, it would be wise to stop blaming animals or aliens or cyberattacks and instead focus on the intricate details of kilowatts and kilowatt-hours and the elegant motion of rotating steel while also welcoming the real lynxes back to the Dehesa. Only by integrating ecology, equity, and engineering can we advance electrification without leading ourselves into both literal and metaphorical darkness.
Sources consulted: REE preliminary incident bulletin; reports in Wired, Reuters, ABC, Euronews, AFP/TechXplore, Carbon Brief on the 28 April blackout; historical analysis of the Venezuelan 2019 blackout (Mongabay, Wikipedia); comparative grid‑failure literature.
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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.
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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…