Statistics reveal that on April 28, a significant grid blackout occurred in Spain, extending into parts of Portugal and France. This event impacted tens of millions of people, leading to grounded flights, disrupted cell networks, and closed businesses. Just before the outage, wind and solar energy accounted for approximately 70% of the electricity generation. Over a week later, the exact cause remains unclear, with officials still investigating. In the realm of AI, SWE-Bench, launched in November 2024, has become a popular benchmark for evaluating AI models’ coding skills. Major companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google frequently reference their SWE-Bench scores in model releases. However, concerns about the integrity of these benchmarks have arisen as participants attempt to game the system.
Javier Blas
@JavierBlas
·
Apr 28 Before the outage hit, Spain was running its grid with very little dispatchable spinning generation, and therefore no much inertia.
Solar PV/thermal + wind: ~78%
Nuclear: 11.5%
Co-generation: 5%
Gas-fired: ~3% (less than 1GW)
Snapshot at 12.30pm local time (outage was 12.35pm)
Jordan Crowder
@digijordan
·
Apr 28 6 days ago, Spain bragged about how their energy grid was running 100% on ‘renewable’ energy…
Today the entire country (plus most of Portugal and parts of France) was plunged into darkness in one of Europe’s worst blackouts ever.
It could take a week to get power all the way
Noah Jakob Rettberg
@NoahRettberg
·
Apr 28 “What the Hell is Going On in Spain?”
At around half past eleven today, Spain and Portugal experienced an almost nationwide blackout.
Small parts of southern France were also briefly affected but reportedly regained power quite quickly.
The Portuguese grid operator currently
Bjorn Lomborg
@BjornLomborg
·
Apr 30 Spanish grid operators knew blackouts were coming (from Feb 2025):
“The high penetration of renewable generation without the necessary technical capabilities in place to keep them operating properly in the event of a disturbance […] can cause power generation outages, which
Javier Blas
@JavierBlas
·
Apr 29 Let’s call it:
The first big blackout of the green electricity era
(Below my notes from the conference call the Spanish grid operator held earlier today with reporters. I added extra information from my initial post, and corrected a location: it was the south-west). 1/2
Visegrád 24
@visegrad24
·
Apr 28 Spain launched an experiment on April 16th to generate all power for the entire Iberian Peninsula only through renawble energy sources such as wind, solar and hydro.
Today, their power grid collapsed leaving Spain, Portugal and France with the largest blackout ever
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
