4.7 • 219 Ratings
🗓️ 21 August 2025
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
In April, Spain suffered a nationwide blackout that lasted nearly a full day. It was a traumatic event for one of Europe’s fastest adopters of solar power, tripling capacity in just five years. The outage sparked a big question: Was solar to blame? And what will it take to avoid blackouts in the renewables era? Bloomberg Green’s Laura Millan joins Akshat Rathi on Zero to unpack the lessons from the Iberian Peninsula and the technologies that could make such blackouts a thing of the past.
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| 0:00.0 | On his podcast Chasing Life, I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta. |
| 0:04.1 | CNN's chief medical correspondent brings you the secrets of the happiest and healthiest people on the planet so that you can live your best life. |
| 0:13.2 | Are some people just born happier than others? |
| 0:15.9 | And what might they be doing that the rest of us aren't? |
| 0:19.9 | Follow Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Apple, Spotify, IHeard podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:30.0 | Welcome to Zero. I am Akshadrati. This week, How to Avoid Blackouts. |
| 0:49.9 | Thank you. week, how to avoid blackouts. We take electricity for granted. And when it disappears, even briefly, we struggle to do simple things in life, like taking |
| 0:58.5 | an elevator or crossing the road without a red light. |
| 1:02.7 | Now imagine a country-wide blackout, not for minutes, but for nearly a full day. |
| 1:08.6 | That's what happened in Spain earlier this year. |
| 1:14.6 | There was no music, there was no TVs were on, |
| 1:18.2 | and people were just on their balconies or outside talking and just spending a spring night under the lights of the candles. |
| 1:24.0 | That's my colleague Laura Milan. |
| 1:26.0 | And while her experience of the blackout sounds like something straight out of a rom-com, that moment was an exception. |
| 1:32.3 | Because for almost a full day, Spain was in chaos, and it sparked a huge conversation. |
| 1:39.3 | In the last five years, Spain has tripled the amount of solar it has deployed on the grid, |
| 1:44.9 | because, of course, it is now the cheapest source of electricity. |
| 1:49.2 | And Spain's story is not unique. |
| 1:51.4 | Solar is being deployed in huge amounts nearly everywhere. |
| 1:55.4 | That's also why people wanted to know was solar to blame for this blackout. |
| 1:59.6 | And if it was, what needs to be done to |
| 2:02.2 | make modern grids stable when intermittent renewables are taking up a growing share of the |
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