Antoni Bassas' analysis: "We ended the week of the blackout without knowing the causes."

We're ending the week of the blackout, which will go down in history, without knowing the causes. It was so massive that we can imagine the Spanish government, Red Eléctrica, and the private electricity companies that do business with generation and distribution carefully choosing which explanation suits them best. And be careful, because knowing the causes is of fundamental interest, which goes far beyond knowing who pays for it, both politically and economically, so we should be sure it won't happen again.

As we published today, A European committee of experts will investigate The causes of the blackout in Spain and Portugal, which they describe as an "exceptional and serious incident." It is not a completely independent committee, as it will include experts who were involved in the incident. For its part, Red Eléctrica assures that it has already provided the Spanish government with "the millions of pieces of data" requested.

Pedro Sánchez's government is very uneasy about the blackout. Beyond the obvious reasons, it took him almost six hours to appear on Monday, and we've heard him say in recent speeches that the rumor that a major blackout could occur in Spain was fake news, one of those rumors circulating to scare people. Then, on April 28th, he showed that a total blackout was possible. Vice President Montero called for patience and said they would get to the bottom of it, while Yolanda Díaz spoke of demanding multi-million-dollar accountability.

In the background, in the initial explanations, we heard that the problem is that we have massively thrown ourselves into producing renewable energy, especially solar energy, and that the system is not prepared to receive it. The question remains: how is it possible that the system is not prepared to receive energy from a new, clean source considered essential if we want to slow the climate crisis? Who hasn't done what should have been done?

And finally, one last note on crisis communication. The Minister of the Interior, Núria Parlon, said on Catalunya Ràdio that we are not going to be send SMS to mobile phones Because there was no risk to life. Aside from being debatable (if the power fails, the functioning of mobility and all services is precarious and, therefore, dangerous), it seems as if the Catalan and Spanish governments don't understand that people are very sensitive, and rightly so: we're coming out of the pandemic, we're coming out of the DANA, and we don't know if we're going to war. We've never seen a power outage across the entire Peninsula. What do they want us to think, that "it's theirs" and that's it? An SMS can be reassuring, because it can provide an official version that defuses conspiracy theories and makes you feel less alone. Now that we've learned, even through drills, that when a major event happens, we'll receive an SMS, a very major event happens and we don't receive it. Whether the SMS could have been sent is another matter: according to experts, mobile phone antennas without backup batteries (which are the majority) couldn't have provided voice, data, or alert service. Will anyone watch it to learn the lesson?

Good morning.