A fire in the south-west of France, which damaged a high-voltage power line has also been identified as a possible cause: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal...
How very California.
Warming world is so hot right now..
Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
231–240 of 1001 posts
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if stores would be able to sell anything without power. My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers. And no price tags.
It's not just stores, pretty much our entire socity runs on cheap power, without it the whole thing falls apart.
Our global society runs on a lot of cheap sources of necessary inputs. Power is just one of them.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#233> "I currently don't have any internet service and just €15 in my wallet - I can't withdraw any money from the ATM," she added. from: https://news.sky.com/story/large-parts-of-spain-and-portugal... This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.
> whistleblowers
Using the term whistleblower in this manner is inappropriate; actual whistleblowers are individuals who bring to light illicit acts by organizations or governments at great personal risk.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me introduce you to the physical receipt block which is made of paper and can be filled up with a pen, and what is still often used in, for example, Christmas markets.
Many countries require receipts to be sent to the tax services instantly. In many cases a long enough power cut (days) would render all transactions illegal (And in many cases you cannot legally pay large amounts of money in cash, it has to be electronic)
Which countries exactly? I've traveled in UK and France and in both countries when the online cash register was down, they opened their physical ledger, made an entry and gave me a physical handwritten paper receipt written with pen and ink. They said they would make enter the same data online when the online cash register comes back up.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me introduce you to the physical receipt block which is made of paper and can be filled up with a pen, and what is still often used in, for example, Christmas markets.
How do you open the cash register for change when power is out?
With the physical key, everything doesn't need to be electronic you know
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#236> "I currently don't have any internet service and just €15 in my wallet - I can't withdraw any money from the ATM," she added. from: https://news.sky.com/story/large-parts-of-spain-and-portugal... This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.
I wonder if stores would be able to sell anything without power. My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers. And no price tags.
Very good point that nowadays many stores rely on barcodes and product IDs to get prices, and don't label individual items... So even pen and paper to keep track of takings is no use since they can't even figure out prices if the system is down!
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#237> "I currently don't have any internet service and just €15 in my wallet - I can't withdraw any money from the ATM," she added. from: https://news.sky.com/story/large-parts-of-spain-and-portugal... This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.
> This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now. Indeed but it stands to reason that this outage will last maybe a few hours until the grid has recovered. A nationwide full blackout is a scenario that's on a "once a quarter century" level, and the last one in 2006 was resolved after two hours. It's Europe, not the US - our grids operate on much…
As long as we’re throwing shade at EU vs US, I can’t remember the last time the US had a nationwide blackout, certainly not in my lifetime!
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Traffic lights are out across Iberia apparently, better stay home.
Do people forget how to drive if there are no lights? I can't imagine many people would think "well, there are no lights, which means GREEEEEEEN!". Over here, a traffic light that doesn't work means it's now a stop sign.
People routinely forget how to drive when the traffic lights ARE working.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#239Older readers may remeber the Northeastern blackout of 2003 in the US and Canada that was caused by cascading overloading, I believe originally triggered by high loads due to hot weather and poor vegetation maintenance under lines. I was an an adjacent area at the time and iirc we were saved by our nuclear operator releasing some insane amount of steam to bring the supply down and avoid more overloading. https://en.m…
Older readers would remember the 1965 blackout. 2003 was only 22 years ago
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many situations call for pen-and-paper backups. Giving out receipts the old way should, in theory, be a possibility, then backfill the computer system later.
Sure, but if we are talking about backup in outages you can also get credit card payments when power is down using something like a Stripe Terminal. This is actually exactly the case that I had in one trip to Andorra: the power was down for 2 hours while we were choosing equipament for skiing. The shop had no issues getting our orders done though, because they just manually filled the orders with pen-and-paper and di…
If your building has a power outage, that works.
If your city has an extended power outage, the cell nets could easily be down as well.