Commission of Inquiry. cartoon of 03/05/2025 in CTXT
Translation of the cartoon: A castle with the sign "Red Eléctrica de España", a person talking at the door: "When you can, let's see if they will look at the blackout".
In an appearance on the night of the blackout, Pedro Sánchez said that on Monday 28 April at 12.33 pm, 15 gigawatts of electricity generation suddenly disappeared from the system. In 5 seconds, the equivalent of 60% of the electricity that was being consumed at that time in the whole country vanished.
And that is all we know today about the electricity blackout that paralysed Spain and Portugal and also had a minor impact in parts of southern France.
There was talk of a breakdown in the southwest, without specifying any details or source, of alien sabotage as a prelude to an invasion until someone said something about a cyber-attack and the hoax/theory spread thanks to linguistic politicians. Then the solar storm and other theories about the weather, forcing the Aemet to report that no unusual meteorological or atmospheric phenomena were detected in Spain that day.
Many of the people on the panel, reconverted for the occasion into electricity experts, insisted that the system and those who operate the national electricity grid are among the best in the world, but no one has yet been found among these figures who knows the exact origin of the breakdown or what was the specific event that triggered the blackout.
The government's communication strategy has been rather shoddy. Many of us were left wanting to see the face of someone from Red Eléctrica de España giving explanations, but what they have given us is the announcement of two commissions of enquiry and the promise that this is going to go on for a long time.
I understand that the useless and dangerous PP members are trying to make political capital out of the move, they would be fools not to try. Besides, they have wallowed in worse shit.
What used to be Red Eléctrica is now a privately-owned chopping block. Redeia is a majority privately owned company. The State owns 20% of Red Eléctrica's capital through the Sociedad Estatal de Participaciones Industriales (Sepi), the remaining 80% is freely traded on international markets for the joy of speculators and other neoliberal sociopaths.
To give you an idea of the state of the electricity sector, with the latest move by the vultures, Amancio Ortega is currently Redeia' s largest shareholder after the state.
The incessant trickle of partial privatisations of many public companies began with Felipe González in the 1980s when the socialists initiated the disinvestment in Endesa and was completed with Aznar in 1997/98 (under his mandate the main companies of the Spanish economy were privatised). From this final plundering came a distribution of nice gifts among PP colleagues and today, politicians of all colours get their golden retirement in some electricity company or other so-called"strategic" company.
This is why we have yet to meet any government capable (or willing) of standing up to the thieves that make up the electricity grid.
