Hello, my name is Ashih Sharma and in this edition of Business Daily, I'm exploring what might have caused a massive electricity blackout that impacted tens of millions of people and caused widespread disruption.

On the morning of April 28, the whole of the Iberian Peninsula, including Portugal, Spain and even parts of

sudden France lost electric power equivalent to that generated by 10 nuclear plants.

The whole region was out of electricity for over 12 hours.

Trains up and down the peninsula grant to a halt.

35,000 people were stranded in Spain, while in Portugal, airport closures led to 185 flights being cancelled.

Companies were forced to shut down for the day,

with estimated losses ranging from $400 million to over $1 billion.

There were lots of things behaving in the grid, so it's not only because the renewables

behave badly, there were even problems with the conventional, so we have problems with

thermal, with cogeneration that end up being the blackout.

In Spain, preliminary investigations suggest fluctuations within the grid system

and a failure of the mechanisms that controlled them were behind the problem,

and that renewables being a variable energy source were the cause of it.

But Spain and Portugal are committed to the European Union's Green Deal,

which means having a 100% renewable electric system by 2050. I'll speak to investors in renewable

technology to find out how this source of power can be smoothly integrated into a system

that is more than 100 years old. That's all coming up in

Business Daily on the BBC. Well, it's a thumpingly warm day and I'm here in a cafe in Barcelona. It's so

bright my sunglasses need sunglasses. And that's great news if you're generating

electricity from solar panels. But here's the problem. This energy isn't consistent. The sun

doesn't shine at night. And the question is being asked after the blackout is whether these

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