On 28 April 2025, a sudden blackout plunged the Iberian Peninsula into darkness. Within hours, renewables were blamed. Months later, experts found a voltage surge – not green energy – triggered the collapse. This article explores how blackouts fuel anti-climate disinformation and distort Europe’s debate on the energy transition.
28 April 2025, 12.33 p.m., the Iberian Peninsula was suddenly left without electricity until the early hours of the following morning. The blackout triggered a flurry of images and news reports. From groups of people gathered around radios to impromptu concerts in parks, and halted trains in the open countryside, the hours of the blackout are immortalised thousands of times on social media and in the news. At the same time, on these platforms and in the streets, theories about the possible causes are exchanged: a rare atmospheric phenomenon, the consequence of European sanctions against Russia, a cyberattack.
One theory quickly gained traction: it is the fault of renewable energy. Social media accounts such as Visegrád 24 – a Polish news aggregator known for spreading propaganda and fake news – and ZeroHedge – a far-right blog – share statements on X that leave little room for doubt: the Iberian Peninsula, which recently achieved high shares of electricity generation from renewables, is now paying a high price. Several newspapers repeated this narrative: 'Spain’s 100% renewable energy milestone followed by historic blackout – Coincidence?', headlined Euro Weekly News – Spain's leading free English-language newspaper – on April 29. Javier Blas, a columnist for Bloomberg, is among the most prolific proponents of the theory that the Spanish blackout was “the first blackout of the green era”, as he wrote in an editorial for the Taipei Times on May 3.
But there is a problem. Large-scale blackouts, explains a 2023 study, usually result from a rapid succession of failures, especially when the power grid is already under stress, for example due to high energy demand. Given the complexity of these events, reconstructing the root causes requires rigorous technical analysis, but above all, it takes time. Those who characterise the causes of a blackout quickly or very quickly – the first posts on X citing renewables as responsible for the blackout emerged within a few hours, reports for Renew Economy energy consultant Ketan Joshi – spread, willing or not, information that is at the least incomplete. “If no one knows the answer, but some claim to know that renewables are to blame, it is quite clearly disinformation”, explains Philip Newell, one of the founders of Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), a global coalition of non governmental organisations committed to combating disinformation about climate change.
The 2025 April blackout is an instructive example: the report on the conditions prevailing in the electricity grid at the time of the blackout was published six months later, in October of the same year. For a complete analysis of the root causes, however, we will have to wait until the first months of this year. So, rewinding the tape to April 28, what actually happened? The October report by an Expert Panel convened by ENTSO-E - the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity - indicates that the immediate cause of the blackout was a voltage surge in the Spanish electricity grid. Electrical engineer Marcial Gonzalez, interviewed by Deutsche Welle, explains that voltage spikes continued to occur, eventually causing some generators to disconnect, and ultimately leading to the shutdown of several power stations and the collapse of the entire system. Based on what has emerged so far, Spain's growing dependence on renewable energy did not play a role in triggering the April blackout, Damian Cortinas, chairman of the board of ENTSO-E, told Reuters.
Nevertheless, the blackout quickly became a symbol of the damage caused by the energy transition among the European right. “The Spanish blackout has essentially become a tool for the political forces that are against renewables to say that renewables cause blackouts, even though it’s been proven that it wasn’t actually renewables”, explains Jaume Loffredo, energy expert and Parliamentary Assistant to Dario Tamburrano of the Italian left party Five Star Movement. This dynamic is highlighted by a few parliamentary questions received by the European Commission in the summer months of this year – before the publication of the ENTSO-E report.
Georg Mayer and Harald Vilimsky, Austrian far-right MEPs, wrote in reference to the power outages in the Iberian Peninsula that “these events highlight fundamental shortcomings in the resilience of the electricity grid infrastructure and raise key questions about the feasibility of the EU’s ambitious climate and energy targets.” Markus Buchheit, German MEP for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), asked the Commission whether it is “considering revising its current energy policies to allow Member States to maintain or strengthen conventional energy sources, such as nuclear or gas, in order to safeguard national energy security.”
Another group was particularly vocal in highlighting a supposed cause-and-effect relationship between energy generation from renewable sources and the blackout in the Iberian Peninsula: the proponents of nuclear energy. In Italy, as Anna Toniolo reported in May 2025 for Facta, some mainstream media outlets are already proposing a pro-nuclear interpretation of the event. “The accident reminds us that in the search for clean energy, we cannot rely on a single source,” says Antonio Polito in his Palomar column on Corriere TV, “this clearly raises the issue of nuclear power, a chapter recently reopened in Italy by our government.”
Online, Maldita reports, one of the first videos to go viral shows workers celebrating the demolition of a power plant mistakenly identified as a nuclear power plant. The video is accompanied by captions such as “these images of the Spanish far left celebrating the destruction of the nuclear power plants that supplied electricity have aged very badly after today's massive blackout”. In reality, the power plant was coal-fired and the video dates back to 2022.
In practice, every aspect of the energy transition – from renewable sources to the electrification of transport – can be called into question when the lights go out. In June, several neighbourhoods in the Northern Italian city of Turin suffered blackouts in quick succession. These power outages were exacerbated by the heat, which overheated electrical cables and led people to turn on their air conditioners, increasing energy demand. Over the weekend of 13-15 June, hundreds of thousands of citizens were left without power for periods ranging from minutes to more than ten hours.
In the local press and on social media, one theory seemed to prevail above all others: it was the fault of the electric vehicle charging stations. “The media repeatedly blamed the heat, the distribution network and air conditioning. I would like to draw attention to the charging stations for electric cars, which are increasingly present in the city," wrote one citizen in the letter pages of the local newspaper La Stampa. On Facebook, a comment under a La Stampa post about the blackouts read: "What about green cars charging? Is no one thinking about that?" In this case, it is not renewables that are being targeted, but a green culprit is quickly identified.
Mutations of the same narratives tend to emerge in different contexts, explains Philip Newell of CAAD. From the Texas blackouts of winter 2021 — when wind turbines were blamed, only for gas-fired power plants to be confirmed as the cause — to limited local cases, this false or incomplete information spreads according to a pattern that Kate Starbird, a researcher in crisis informatics - the study of how information and communication technologies are used during crisis events - has described as 'participatory disinformation'. Biased media, politicians, web personalities, and ordinary citizens 'participate' in creating and amplifying narratives that quickly become entrenched in public opinion. In the case of the blackout that hit the Iberian Peninsula, for example, a study conducted by CAAD found that, a few months after the event, 36% of the Spanish public and 22% of the British public identified “the power grid's excessive dependence on renewable energy” as one of the causes of the power cuts.
However, the inaccuracy or incompleteness of the information circulating in the early days following a blackout is only part of the threat. Even in cases in which information is subsequently disproved, the rapid spread of anti-green narratives following blackouts, aided by some mainstream media outlets, contributes above all to reinforcing polarisation on the energy transition – from renewables to the electrification of transport – making it harder for democratic debate on how to decarbonise our energy system to emerge. However, according to Newell, there is no shortage of solutions. One above all: treat climate disinformation spread via digital platforms by monetised accounts as a form of false advertising. “False advertising is illegal, and much of this is more or less just hidden misleading advertising for the fossil fuel industry,” Newell explains, “treating it this way is, in my opinion, a little simpler.”
The research for this article was made possible thanks to the support of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union | Global Dialogue’s Climate Change Disinformation Media Fellowship 2025.
The views and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union | Global Dialogue.
This article first appeared in Italian on A Fuoco.