Summary

In this talk we will summarize the available information on the series of events that led to the blackout in Iberia on the 28th of April 2025. There are still a lot of unknowns, but some pieces of the puzzle are already in the public domain, so we will discuss some plausible (yet unconfirmed) explanations for each contingency in the chain of events. It seems to have been a complex cascading failure and therefore we will have to wait for the official reports to come to definitive conclusions. This talk simply aims to serve as a thought experiment to spark discussion among the power systems community on best practices for operating modern grids.

Speaker Bio

Luis Badesa is Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering at UPM and Visiting Researcher at Imperial College London, where he obtained his PhD in 2020. He studies the operation and economics of electricity grids on the road to decarbonization, where maintaining stability is a major challenge. He is currently PI of two national projects and supervisor of 4 PhD students working in this area.