Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
POWER CUTS THAT plunged most of Spain and Portugal into blackout conditions have been incorrectly blamed on solar flares by online commentators, despite no significant solar activity being recorded yesterday.
Electricity had been restored to more than 90% of mainland Spain early today, the REE power operator said.
The cause of the blackout is still unknown, and an investigation is underway to understand what caused electricity to go down throughout most of the Iberian peninsula on Monday, leaving passengers stranded in trains and elevators.
However, that has not prevented baseless speculation about the cause of the blackouts; online accounts have cited false information about the blackouts, in posts shared by thousands of others and viewed millions of times.
“The Authorities are blaming the mass power outages in Spain, Portugal & France on a Solar Flare” a post by a conspiracy theorist account on X that was viewed more than 1,700,000 times said.
(Authorities, such as Spain’s Prime Minister, have actually said the cause is currently unknown and asked people not to speculate.)
The post includes a short clip of images from NASA’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), which shows images of the sun’s surface, including flares and eruptions. The video appears to show a dramatic eruption.
However, the clip also shows the date on which the footage was recorded: 10 May 2024, almost a full year before the blackouts.
Claims that the Iberian blackouts were caused by solar flares, or that authorities had at least blamed the blackouts on solar flares, have been viewed millions of times on X.
About a dozen posts making the same claim were also published on Facebook, including one that was viewed more than 17,000 times.
The idea of a solar flare causing blackouts isn’t fictional. An eruption from the sun hit Earth in 1859, causing dramatic currents to surge through electrical systems.
Although a similar event today could shut down electrical grids, in 1859 the effects were less catastrophic; the telegraph system went down, operators got electric shocks, and some paper in telegraph machines caught on fire.
However, ice cores indicate that similar events happen every few centuries, and if such a flare were to hit nowadays, it would likely have disastrous consequences given our reliance on extensive electrical and communication grids.
Many of the online posts blaming solar flares for the Iberian blackouts also claim that there is some sort of a cover-up and blame the transition to more sustainable energy sources.
“The solar flare excuse is a lie,” an American conservative said on X, instead promoting another unproven accusation. “Spain outage is why green energy doesn’t work.”
These claims are false. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration monitors the sun continuously in order to predict disruptive events on the Sun.
Their Space Weather Prediction Center includes warnings as well as readouts of data from the sun.
No significant jumps in the proton flux were reported in the last week, and readings remained far below the 10 MeV warning threshold that characterises a minor solar storm.
The only recent warnings, given on Sunday, were said to potentially affect satellites only.
Other theories on the cause of the Iberian blackouts, including weather fluctuations, cyber attacks, and human error, have all been suggested, and then dismissed as baseless by authorities.
However, although the actual cause has yet to be established, it is certain that the electrical grid was not overwhelmed by a solar flare that, according to scientific instruments aimed at the sun, didn’t happen.
With reporting from AFP.
The Journal’s FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. You can read it here. For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader’s Guide here. You can read about the team of editors and reporters who work on the factchecks here.
have your say