Off and waiting

After a massive economic crisis that shook the country twice, a pandemic arrived, locking us at home and forcing us to go digital and flex our muscles to survive emotionally and financially. Just when we naively thought the zombie apocalypse was all that was missing, on Monday we were left in the dark and without a telephone connection. Disconnected from the world. For hours on end—in our case, almost twelve—we were unable to rely on the usual means to do our work. Obviously, thanks to foresight, resilience, and cooperation, like so many companies on the Iberian Peninsula, we didn't stop serving our readers for a single minute on the website and social media, arriving on newsstands the next day. The first positive assessment of this new crisis is the resilience of a society that peacefully takes to the streets, returns home as best it can, provides service despite everything, and handles frustration without violence. That the public reaction will be calm is not obvious, and if one day indignation translates into anger or looting, we will have lost the cohesion we consider so natural today and we will bitterly regret it.

To avoid distrust in public managers, we would need to be more diligent in our explanations and show some empathy. Crisis communication consists of explaining that there is someone in charge of the uncertain situation, doing everything possible to return to normal as quickly as possible, or at least to prevent things from getting worse. Putting on a blank face and speaking late or from a police perspective rather than from a public service perspective is a communication error. Citizens are not minors but adults who are losing their businesses and are looking for an explanation and someone in charge with a sense of urgency.

We won't have conclusive explanations for what happened soon, but we do know some things. At 12:33 p.m., a group of power generators in Extremadura failed, 1.5 seconds later another failed, and 3.5 seconds later, France disconnected from Spain for self-protection. The unexpected disconnection caused 60% of the energy in Spain, which has 60,000 generation points, to go down. The firewalls didn't work, the concatenation of disconnections brought down the entire grid, and then Red Eléctrica was slow to give permission to the utilities to restore service to those sources capable of doing so immediately. This is not the case with nuclear power.

We citizens have discovered that fluctuations with renewables are not regulated and that electricity production is more designed to ensure a business than to ensure distribution, something that could already be sensed. The point is that we have too much Cheap energy that isn't regulated, hydropower is reserved for when it's most expensive, and policymakers knew that changes were needed to update the grid to meet the new production sources. It's Red Eléctrica that must decide at every moment what the optimal way to generate electricity is, and we don't have a grid prepared to manage itself under the new conditions of cheaper renewable energies, which drive down prices and expose the most expensive energies and the actions of distributors.

The Spanish government's war with the electricity companies has been going on for some time now, and the blackout won't improve relations, but transparent information is essential to understand how two countries can be left in the dark and disconnected for an entire workday. There's no need to even talk about the repercussions on the next day's trains. The patience of the Catalans seems inexhaustible. We'll now see how the new battle in the energy model war begins and the nuclear route is recovered. The least we can demand is a technical debate and transparency in the interests defended by political parties, and to know on behalf of which companies they are acting, or if it is on behalf of consumers.

The Sánchez government will not only be dealing with the electricity companies in the coming weeks, but also with the banks. The CNMC's conditional approval of the takeover bid has surprisingly included the vote of the Junts minister in favor of the operation that would eliminate Banc Sabadell. The government and the majority of business and social entities in Catalonia are asking the Sánchez government to halt the operation for reasons of "territorial cohesion," since this is understood to be a transnational merger in political terms. There are no half measures; postponing the operation for five years, as some sources suggest, does not mean halting it. Postponing it would be a bad decision that would only bog down a transaction that is currently on hold. A less-than-serious solution.