It is hardly surprising that when Spain suddenly and mysteriously lost half its power supply on Monday, throwing the country into chaos, thoughts immediately turned to the possibility of a cyber attack. The threat of a hostile power gaining access to our infrastructure in order to provoke a catastrophic failure has preoccupied security expects for years, leading, for example, to the Conservative government reversing its decision to allow a company close to the Chinese government to build Britain’s 5G network.
Spanish authorities still have no answer as to what caused the blackout, but the reason will almost certainly turn out to be more mundane. It will very likely be related to Spain’s growing reliance on intermittent wind and solar, which engineers have long known makes an electricity grid more vulnerable to technical failure. Balancing supply and demand in a power grid is never an easy business, but it is a lot more difficult when you are dealing with wind farms and solar farms whose output varies massively from one day to the next, and cannot be controlled in the way a gas, coal or nuclear power station can.
