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Experts, baffled again! I mean, seriously, what are they good for? Yesterday, the New York Times ran a mysterious story teasingly headlined, “What We Know About the Power Outages in Spain and Portugal.” In brief, Spain, Portugal, and parts of France lost power for most of yesterday and they still don’t know why.




¡Ay, caramba! Across two and a half European countries, at exactly 12:35pm local time, all the electric trains and subways stopped. Elevators froze. Computers died. ATM’s seized up. Planes couldn’t land. Traffic lights winked out. City streets became coagulated arteries. In short, it was general chaos served with a cold side of uncooked yucca fries.

Don’t miss this: Yesterday marked the largest peacetime blackout in European history. Rebooting the power grid took about 18 hours, giving millions unscheduled vacations from screen time.

“The cause,” the Times unenergetically reported, “is still under investigation.”

At a late Monday evening press conference, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez saltily told reporters, “This has never happened before.” ¡Que lastima! Experts, always useless when it counts, remain confounded. “What caused it is something that the experts have not yet established — but they will," Sánchez promised, adding “no hypothesis has been rejected, and every possible cause is being investigated.”

Don’t hold your breath. I’ll bet you 1,000 pesos it remains a forever mystery, stored in the same file with 2020-2021’s mysterious missing flu seasons.

The first widely reported (and rightfully mocked) excuse the government offered yesterday, right out of the manually operated gate, was that the grid crashed due to a complicated rare atmospheric phenomenon described by power officials in obscure technical language so dense and impenetrable that Christopher Columbus could have walked across it to America.

But they’ve already given that one up. The article reported, “REN, the Portuguese electricity and gas supplier, denied reports that an unspecified ‘atmospheric phenomenon’ was to blame.”

Oh. So nevermind.

Nowhere in the article did the Times reveal where the original “reports” came from— which was government officials. Their first impulse was to lie and make up a complicated, unprovable fairy tale. And they complain that we don’t trust them. But I digress.

The Times next said there was no evidence of any cyberattack. Spain’s state grid operator, Red Electrica, said a “very strong oscillation in the electrical network” caused the disconnect, but that just pushed the question back one step to what caused the oscillation? They aren’t even speculating.

Online, many folks observed that two weeks ago, Spain (where the blackouts began) celebrated switching to “100% green power.” April 22nd headline from PV Magazine...

The timing suggests that could be some sort of clue. But Politico EU reported that EU officials have ruled it out. They said there’s no possible way that renewable production could be to blame, since they have rules to prevent that sort of thing from happening. So just forget about it. Take your science denialism and conspiracy theories and go sell them someplace else (*that has power).

My favorite independent weather catastrophist, SpaceWeatherNews, claims to have identified evidence (Youtube; 49:01) that the Earth’s weakening magnetic field essentially failed, collapsing for a brief second, and giving the affected region a blast of solar energy comparable to a massive flare, even though the Sun was mostly quiet. At least he has a theory.

Is it reassuring to you that, unlike SpaceWeatherman, the EU government’s highly-paid experts don’t even have a theory about the largest, multi-country, peacetime blackouts in Europe? Is this a power crisis or a crisis in expertise? The answer is: probably both. And no, all the official confusion is not reassuring. Not at all.