What Spain’s Blackout Means for America’s Grid and Its Energy Storage Future

On April 28, 2025, a sudden and massive blackout plunged Spain and Portugal into darkness, disrupting daily life across the Iberian Peninsula. Within a mere five seconds, the region lost approximately 15 gigawatts (GW) of power, accounting for about 60% of its electricity supply. This rapid cascade was triggered by voltage surges and inadequate grid planning, leading to a chain reaction of disconnections that overwhelmed its systems. The April 28 blackout across Spain and Portugal sent more than just homes into darkness; it sent a warning to grid operators around the world.

As electricity demand spikes and renewable integration accelerates, the risks of poorly coordinated infrastructure grow. For the U.S., this wasn’t just someone else’s crisis; it was a glimpse into what could happen without more agile, flexible and resilient grid solutions. The incident serves as a stark reminder of the liabilities inherent in modern power grids, especially as nations accelerate the integration of various energy sources and energy demand skyrockets. This was a clear signal: waiting until the lights go out isn’t a plan.

While growing energy demand affects both the U.S. and European power grids, their underlying structures highlight important differences. In the European Union (E.U.), grids like those in Spain and Portugal are centrally managed by national operators and aligned under E.U.-wide standards. This coordination helps with planning but can also create shared vulnerabilities, as seen in the Iberian blackout.

The U.S., by contrast, runs a patchwork of three major interconnections—Eastern, Western, and Texas (ERCOT)—each with distinct rules and authorities. While this fragmentation can prevent one region’s failure from toppling another, it also makes coordination harder.

The stark contrast between Europe’s centralized grid and America’s patchwork of regional systems isn’t just a policy quirk—it’s the difference between a blackout that cascades across nations and one that’s isolated to a single state. Spain’s recent grid failure showed how rapidly disruption can spread when systems lack flexibility and rapid-response tools.

In the U.S., we face a different risk: fragmentation that slows coordination and modernization. Here we’ll explore what the Iberian blackout revealed about grid resilience and make the case for why the U.S. must double down on technologies and planning strategies that respond faster, recover smarter and prevent small disruptions from becoming national crises.

Comparing Grid Models: A Foundation for Resilience

Spain’s blackout revealed how quickly a highly centralized grid can spiral out of control. When one part fails, the rest often follows. In contrast, the U.S. grid, divided into those three interconnections, limits that kind of cascading failure. But it brings its own challenges.

Regionalization gives U.S. regions autonomy and room to innovate, yet it also leads to fragmented oversight, inconsistent investment and slower modernization. No single authority manages national planning, which makes coordinating upgrades and integrating renewables harder. Texas, in particular, with its famously independent grid, remains largely cut off from other states. As Winter Storm Uri proved in 2021, this isolation can be devastating when local generation falters.

Ultimately, neither model offers a perfect blueprint. Europe’s centralized approach enables more seamless renewable integration and cross-border coordination but amplifies the risk of widespread disruption. The U.S., while insulated from cascading failures, faces persistent challenges due to its distributed planning and regulatory landscape. Strengthening grid resilience will require a hybrid approach—one that enhances coordination and planning across regions without undermining the flexibility and innovation that decentralized systems can provide.

Harnessing Technology for a Resilient Grid

The Iberian and Winter Storm Uri blackouts serve as cautionary tales, highlighting the need for proactive measures to enhance grid resilience. In the U.S., addressing similar vulnerabilities requires a multifaceted approach that leverages advanced technologies to manage increasing energy demands and the integration of renewable sources.

Distributed energy storage systems emerge as a critical solution in this strategy. By providing rapid-response capabilities, these systems can effectively balance supply and demand fluctuations, mitigating the risk of widespread outages. These systems are particularly adept at addressing the intermittency of renewable energy sources like solar and wind, which can cause sudden drops in power generation. Deployed at the front-of-the-meter, these systems also deliver fast frequency response, responding within milliseconds to seconds to arrest frequency deviations during potential disturbances. Put simply, storage brings persistency to intermittent power sources.

Complementing storage, AI offers transformative potential in grid operations. AI-driven predictive dispatch strategies enable more accurate forecasting of energy demand and supply, facilitating real-time adjustments to maintain grid stability. For instance, AI algorithms can analyze vast datasets, including weather patterns and consumption trends, to optimize minute-to-minute energy distribution and preemptively address potential disruptions. This proactive approach enhances the grid’s adaptability to dynamic conditions, reducing the likelihood of failures akin to the Iberian blackout. These tools are already being piloted in U.S. markets, helping grid operators monitor real-time supply and demand balances and isolate faults faster than human teams ever could on their own.

Yet, even as AI and fast-response systems tighten grid operations by the minute, significant gaps remain in bridging extended periods of low renewable output. A key part of the solution lies not just in technology deployment, but in accelerating deployment pathways. Project delays driven by congested interconnection queues mean storage and energy projects sit idle for years, wasting both time and grid resilience benefits. Yet real momentum is emerging. Recently, Google and PJM announced that they are deploying AI-enhanced planning tools to streamline PJM’s interconnection process and cut completion times for new service requests. AI scaling already helped PJM process 140 GW of applications and aims to shrink interconnection timelines from over 40 months down to just 1–2 years by 2026. That matters because every month shaved off the queue means faster dispatch of batteries and renewables, improved outage prevention and real-world resilience instead of theory

By pairing rapid-acting storage and smart dispatch with faster interconnection pathways, operators can ensure resilience is not only possible but deployable when and where it’s needed.

Long-Duration Energy Storage: Promise Meets Reality

Spain’s blackout exposed a critical gap: even fast-response storage and renewable generation can’t maintain grid stability over prolonged disruption. Long-duration energy Storage (LDES) systems, capable of 10+ hour discharge, could potentially address that gap. These systems aren’t just about energy arbitrage; they promise to deliver the sustained support that renewables alone can’t provide during prolonged lulls or cascading failures. These are often touted as a linchpin for deep renewable integration. But the realities of the landscape require adjustments to policies and timelines.  

While LDES technologies are demonstrably viable, market and economic signals lag behind. First, most U.S. wholesale and capacity markets only reward storage that lasts a few hours, not days. This leaves LDES undercompensated for the developers who would otherwise build them, despite the technology’s ability to bridge prolonged renewable gaps. Second, the lack of steady, duration-based revenue means that LDES often sits idle unless governments incentivize it or markets are reformed. Third, CapEx is high and financing is complex. These systems often require specific siting or geological conditions and are significantly costlier compared to the more common short-duration battery storage assets in operation today.

Instead, traditional energy storage systems are stepping up, delivering real, high-impact resilience across U.S. grids right now. These systems are scaling fast: utility-scale battery storage saw a record 10.3 GW added in 2024 and is on track for an even bigger leap of 18.2 GW in 2025 and is projected to reach up to a total of 65 GW by the end of 2026. This surge signals a new era of fast-acting resilience and trust that storage systems can deploy quickly, shore up grid stability under pressure and unlock tangible value across energy markets.

But batteries can only go so far. When disruptions stretch longer or inertia is needed to arrest frequency swings, hydropower can step in.

Hydropower: A Revived Answer for Grid Resilience

Hydropower’s enduring reliability is why it remains a vital complement to storage-based resilience tools. For decades, hydropower has quietly anchored power grids, offering reliable, stable generation and fast-response flexibility crucial for preventing blackouts. Its spinning generators supply mechanical inertia that helps maintain grid frequency during disturbances and can ramp output in seconds to minutes, much like distributed energy storage systems, making it a powerful tool for restoring balance when other sources are unable.

Recent analysis underscores why this matters: during the Iberian blackout, hydropower plants’ self-start capability and rapid output ramping enabled system operators to restore power to the grid, a real-world demonstration of hydropower’s crisis resilience.

In the U.S., hydropower projects remain vital resilience tools. Reservoir-based operators can sustain full output for hours or even weeks, aiding long-duration grid balancing during low-renewable periods. As the grid weathers more heatwaves, storms and variable renewable patterns, hydropower’s controllable output and long operational life make it a natural complement to solar and battery energy storage, offering reliability and stability. Growing international investment in modernizing hydropower through AI incorporation, retrofits and small modular systems further highlights its evolving role in next-generation grid architecture.

Charting a Resilient Energy Future

The Iberian blackout serves as a stark reminder of the vulnerabilities inherent in modern power grids. For the United States, this event underscores the urgency of reimagining grid infrastructure to enhance resilience, flexibility and real-time adaptability.

This transformation requires a diversified approach that builds on proven technologies like battery energy storage systems and taps into underutilized assets like hydropower to provide dependable, dispatchable support. As more renewable energy comes online, grid operators and developers will need to look beyond capacity alone, prioritizing systems that can react, recover and stabilize under pressure.

By learning from global grid failures and embracing a layered mix of technologies, the U.S. can build a future-ready grid that’s not just about storing electrons but about supplying uninterrupted, system-wide stability whenever and wherever it is needed.