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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   24240 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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In a start to the new week in Europe that is certainly a start, the Iberian peninsula has reportedly just been hit by a major power outage affecting both Spain and Portugal, including their capitals, and parts of southern France. The power outage occurred during the day, and is disrupting activities down to the public transportation level. Power is being gradually restored, though how long for full restoration is unclear.

There is no identified cause (yet), but this sort of outage on such a geographically diverse scale does not usually happen by accident. The Spanish government is probing a possible cyberattack.

While it is possible for problems in parts of the European energy grid to cause problems elsewhere, and there was a fire recently affecting a Spanish-French high-voltage cable, I am unaware of any analogous incident where a power grid failure on the Spanish-French side would affect the Portugal side of Spain as well. (For Americans, this is roughly analogous to an incident in eastern texas leading to outages in western Texas.)

Timing is a soft-indicator that supports, but do not prove, a hostile intent.

Purely mechanical system outages tend to either be random breaks or a result of load shifting. Random breaks (key thing somewhere breaks at a bad time) is more randomly distributed over time and thus more likely on weekends and nights rather than week days. Load-shift outages can occur when a power grid fails to properly balance when raising to meet daily production. This increases the impact on the mornings, when industrial centers increase energy demand for the daily work shifts, or possibly afternoons, when post-work tool-downs create a new load-balance challenge. However, this outage reportedly occurred mid-day, when the power load is relatively stable.

Weekday afternoons, and especially early in a work week, are more valuable hostile-disruption windows. Noon and afternoon attacks affect more people out in their days, and cause more social panic as parents are separated from children or trapped without working public transportation. Mondays in particular are the inverse of the 'bury bad news by publicizing it Friday' rule. An event on Mondays is more likely to dominate public discourse and media coverage for the new work week.

Correlation is not causation, and that does bear reminding here. However, that reminder does not mean correlation is irrelevant to anything else. Expect cyber-security paradigm discussions to grow, particularly if a benign fault can't be identified. Even if a benign fault is identified, awareness of the scale of vulnerability is likely to be used either in other messaging efforts, or as inspiration for copy-cat attacks.

My best wishes for anyone affected, and hope for everyone to stay safe and have a power outage plan.

However, this outage reportedly occurred mid-day, when the power load is relatively stable.

There are hints that Spain might have lost a line from France amounting to about 10% of total consumption.

That's a large shift, but on the supply side, not on the load side.

Possibly followed by cascading trips downstream due to mismanagement/negligence/general unpreparedness for such a situation. At least that would be my initial "benign" version of what happened.

Agreed, and I tried to include a reference to it. I doubt it- my understanding is that a previous incident that would be analogous didn't reach Portugal- but it is the most 'benign' interpretation, and worth saying outright.

I bet on incompetence.

This may be possible but it it's not as if these countries were just introduced to electricity last month.

They weren't but, uh, it's the Iberian peninsula. It's like an outpost of the Balkans.

From my experience (in the energy industry), Spain's reputation is fine for their admin competence.

Although maybe not so much anymore...

Spain, Portugal, Southern France -- yeah, that checks out.

Been reading the Master and Commander series and this reminds me of how Jack says he likes fighting Spaniards because while their ships are beautiful and their commanders are brave, they are never, ever, ready on time.

Ayyy, what book are you up to? I've just started Desolation Island.

Jack also says he likes using African boarding parties because they steal the courage out of Spaniards. There's a scene where the boarders get a bit excited pre-action and cover themselves in cooking grease and ash in Napoleonic Blackface.

I'm in H.M.S. Surprise, great stuff so far. Really awesome series and I can't wait until AI can render the whole thing as per the Russell Crowe movie.

Same. Not a high confidence bet on my part, but seems far more readily plausible than a cyberattack.

There is no identified cause (yet), but this sort of outage on such a geographically diverse scale does not usually happen by accident.

It's happened by accident at least twice in the US. 1965, 2003.

Assuming it was a cyberattack, who are the most likely culprits? It feels more likely a nation state than a real independent (as in not a group that's nominally independent but isn't really) hacker group, right? I would assume a hacker group would have a list of demands and would probably have taken credit for it by now. But then what nation state would want to go for Spain/Portugal (they're not really big players in The Great Game of international intrigue are they?), particularly as they're both NATO members?

The visible-but-non-central dynamic might have been part of a motive.

Fairly or unfairly, the 2004 Madrid train bombings are often considered a case study in 'terrorism can work' due to the subsequent withdrawal from Iraq by the spanish socialist party. Coincidentally, the current socialist/social-democratic ruling coalition recently proposed an unpopular/politically controversial €10 billion military spending hike by decree. This came about a month after Spain disagreed with the EU military fund for Ukraine support, and after last week Spain claimed it was going to meet the 2% NATO military spending goal by focusing on cybersecurity. Spain's contemporary history of not-spending on hard military capacities has been a cause of political friction with allies abroad, and a basis of domestic friction within.

In a correlation-suggestions-motive framing, the cyberattack may have been decided for multiple reasons, including-

  • Assessment that Spain is currently too weak / too minor to directly inflict unacceptable retaliation
  • Belief that a cyber-attack would cause the ruling spanish political consensus to reject NATO-desired hardpower spending in favor of defensive cyber-spending
  • Expectation the Spanish government's cyber-prioritization would preclude cyber-spending from being used on less desirable military spending, i.e. Ukraine aid
  • Demonstrate/implicitly threaten other NATO/EU countries from some policies by demonstrating the consequence of vulnerability

Also it allows you to demonstrate that you can hit NATO generally, while demonstrating that on a rather timid non-central NATO member, and not one that would blow their top and massively escalate hostilities in response. Like France or the United Kingdom. @MadMonzer

The United Kingdom failed to blow their top in response to the Litvinenko and Skripal poisonings, which under international norms are worse than a cyberattack on power networks (because they involved WMD) although less directly destructive.

There is admittedly an interesting counterfactual question about how many marginal rockets got delivered to Ukraine because of Salisbury.

Nerve agents are technically a WMD, and cyberattacks technically aren’t. But crippling an entire nation for weeks, causing billions of dollars in economic damage and probably hundreds of connected follow-on deaths is a lot closer in effect to a WMD than poisoning one guy in a restaurant.

Russia are the most obvious culprits, with relatively little to lose. Spain and Portugal not priority targets for them, but they are NATO members and broadly pro-Ukraine, and this could be a target of opportunity

How likely is it that the original target was France and Spain and Portugal were collateral damage?

Macron has been the de facto leader of the anti-Putin coalition in Europe for a while now.

You mean Russians tried hacking France, but accidentally hacked grid control computers in Spain. That doesn't seem very likely.

What is likely is that the renewables heavy grid collapsed because it's just not stable because the inputs fluctuate, and keeping it stable is no easy task and there has been several near misses, such as the near blackout in Germany in '21.

There's a vast amount of essays out there that ackshually connecting intermittent sources of energy to the grid is perfectly safe and something such as unexpectedly fast arrival of clouds causing a decrease in solar can't be a problem because you can just fire up gas peaker plants you are, of course, maintaining in running order for just that eventuality.

Obviously, relying on a finite set of known weather-independent power sources is a lot easier than carefully balancing varying power production with demand.

Renewable-heavy grid stability requires many weird, and unnatural approaches. Such as simply heating hot air and blowing it out into the atmosphere. Currently, Czech officials are looking at approvals for about 1 GW worth of 'electricity wasters'.

Luckily, a law was passed to prevent the construction of a gigawatt worth of power-wasting devices..

Why now? Macron has been this way for a while, he’s currently distracted trying to influence the upcoming conclave, and there’s no elections coming up.

Generally, a hack of this extent and visibility cannot be easily repeated with the same methods once its done - even if youre openly hostile towards the states in question, there needs to be a reason why its used now.

That's assuming it required burning some zero-days. Could be that the target was vulnerable in a well understood, but relatively unique way, and the attacker thought the window would eventually close as the technical debt was paid down and decided it was worth pulling the trigger now. Of course, any large scale attack using a known vulnerability will increase scrutiny on that vulnerability and likely send anyone potentially vulnerable to it scrambling for a fix, but maybe only this part of the grid was vulnerable to this attack, other parts of the grid are not so heightened awareness doesn't burn any cards the attacker had in hand.

I guess I dont expect anything of this impact to be vulnerable in a well understood way that basically anyone could exploit, else it would be down a lot more often. And even if you think the window might close, then gain from doing it like this, even if youre never found out, is ~zero. I doubt those triggers are worth pulling any time before the "enemy has a war economy" stage.

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