I'm not sure where exactly to post this, but most folks in the US and Canada can check out where their power is coming from. I work in the power generation industry, and I feel there are many aspects that people just do not understand when it comes to generation and what we need to go fully renewable and/or carbon free.

"Independent system operators" (better known as ISOs) can provide you with your local power information. A nice overview can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_transmission_organization_(North_America)#Independent_system_operators_(ISOs)

I live in New England, so my local info can be seen here: https://www.iso-ne.com/isoexpress/
I can see the projected MW load, how much was scheduled to cover it, the cost per MW, where the power is coming from (at the moment, 5% is oil, 6% is hydro, 12% is "renewables"... as burning trash is considered renewable as much as solar and wind lulz, 19% is nuclear, and 52% is natural gas [NG]), and I can also see the CO2 outputs (which before you make a judgement call to state that yes, NG is the highest producer of CO2, if you look at the MW produced per ton of CO2, it's WAY better than the others!).

If you're in Texas and were there in early '21 during the Uri storm, I'm sure you've heard of ERCOT (https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards). That region has a much higher demand for power in general, and I do find it amusing (yet not at all surprising) that no CO2 info is offered.

In the California area (which is where I hail from), it's displayed here: https://www.caiso.com/supply. I have, at times, found that their imported MW actually were the main supplier, which let's just be honest: they buy power from NV and AZ and that power isn't "clean", but they tote that they're so good to the environment! (Please also note, CA is a huge supplier of CO2 courtesy of all the forest fires.) Also, note that my company literally owns two "peakers" (that's a term for an engine you can turn on and get power out of quickly, without all the slow startup times or shutdown issues that typical power plants have - think of it as a jet engine you just turn on for quick power with really high emissions compared to most plants) that put out more emissions than were typically allowed on permits when they were commissioned, but glorious Newsome realized that balancing the ability to charge your Tesla and having rolling blackouts was a bit precarious. Also alsø: if you look at the CaISO page, the geothermal output is all my company. That range of plants takes the grey water from SF and reincorporates it into the geysers to keep up the 100% clean output.

So, after the fact, I'll state that I'm a little biased: I grew up in CA, and I'm very conscious about emissions and climate change (and yes, I believe that has been playing into effect for a while). But I also am a realist living near California's little red-headed stepsibling Massachusetts that is trying to shoot their foot for carbon emissions and the like.

But, I wanted to put this out there because I hope that folks (who aren't in the industry) might appreciate the insight, and also learn how to figure out what is going on when you plug your <insert power demand item here>. :)

I'm writing this as a way to, I guess, journal my thoughts but also share my experience, here's hoping it makes an interesting read. Sorry in advance if this feels disjointed or disorganized, I'm writing as I go.

So for those of you that don't know, today there was a massive blackout in Iberia and some regions of France, and it was a total blackout. Over 60 million people were affected.

The causes are still unclear, but it appears that it was due to a rare meteorological event that took out a high voltage line. This line distabilized all of the grid and took out the power. As far as we know, there was no cyber attack or anything of the sort.

Anyway, here's how things went down for me.

Today I woke up at 8:00 in the morning, went to work as usual. In my office, we had a completely normal morning as usual. But then, around 11:30, power goes out. Our monitors stopped working, lights shut down, ventilation system turned off, the whole shebang.

I thought, "just another blackout, should come back any moment". But then, my colleague sitting on my side, was on a call with someone in Porto - we were in another city - and that the power there was also out. (our wifi had UPS, so we had internet for a while).

While very rare, it actually wasn't the first time that this happened. Last year we had an outage that took out several regions in Portugal. So I thought, "again? Weird."

People started talking to each other, calling friends and family to ask them if they also had the outage. And sure enough, all of them did. Soon enough we started to find out that even Lisbon and Algarve were missing power, so it was a national outage.

Cellular data still worked, I started refreshing all the news websites that I knew of and checking r/portugal on reddit. These moments were... Not unnerving per se, but worrisome. Never in my life I experienced something like this.

Some news started coming in, but none of them mentioned anything that we already didn't know. Just that there was a outage and that there wasn't a lot of information about it.

Comments on reddit started saying that this outage was also international, that regions in Spain were affected. Soon after, also France. Then some also said that it happened in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Italy.

Soon after, it dropped, and I paraphrase the title of the news: "Outage in Europe. Military personnel summoned".

My dudes, the brainstorm and red flags that went in my head at this moment...... I kept my cool and tried to stay calm, but internally I was going at 300 km/h. The only logical conclusion at this time was "Russia is f*cking invading us".

Didn't help that, at this time, there still wasn't any confirmations if it was a cyber attack or not, so all the possibilities were on the table as far as I was concerned.

I kept refreshing, waiting for the page to update with more information, while hanging out with my colleagues. After a short while, around 12:30 - I think - there were confirmations that it wasn't a cyber attack, but instead a technical incident. The comments and reports were all over the place, some said it was a fire in France, then an airplane that crashed, then it was something in Spain, etc etc. So I decided to tune everything out and only use that page as SSOT.

Glad I did that because, we all decided to go for lunch, and people were all talking about what happened. And some, started saying that russian submarines were spotted along the coast, that they saw it on Facebook. Misinformation on social today must have been on an all time high.

Our company decided to let us go home, so I got into my car and went home. While traveling, I turned on the radio to "Antena 1", a national radio station that kept giving us information about what was happening.

So for starters, yes, the military was summoned but it was to help with all the problems that we were facing. People got stuck in metro stations and elevators. Traffic lights weren't working so there were accidents. People panicked and started buying anything and everything on the supermarkets and stores. Some gas stations closed.

Some supermarkets and stores were closed due to them not being able to process the purchases. The only one that remained open were the ones with generators.

Pharmacies were also facing issues since they couldn't connect to their centralized databases (from what I understood), but there were also worries if their generators would last long enough to keep the medications in low temperatures.

As I was driving, it was also confirmed that general power would return between 6 to 10 hours, but at most it could take 72. General power should be stabilized in a week.

Once I got home, I found my old radio, that has at least 20 years, put some batteries in it and synced to Antena 1, and listened to it throughout the whole day. We're talking about an analogue radio, the kind that you have to rotate the wheel to set the frequency.

One thing that I started to appreciate, is how my iphone 12 pro max, a technological marvel, became basically unusable. While this simple piece of plastic that my parents bought for maybe 5 euros just worked. The cellular towers started to fail throughout the country, as they themselves started to run out of power (I assume they had generators). Meanwhile, this radio, it just worked.

I spent the whole day listening to it, and took the chance to watch Chainsaw man, that I had downloaded on my phone.

It was.... I don't really know how to describe it, but the fact that I could keep up with what was happening was good. The idea of just waiting without knowing what was happening is stressful. This tiny radio was my only source of information, at this point I had no internet, no TV, no calls, no text messages, no nothing, just the radio.

I know that right now it feels like I'm praising the hell out of that radio, but that's because it really did feel like the only connection I had to the outside the world, not counting my neighbours of course.

As for food and water, thankfully I was fine. But there were people that didn't have much at hand and - understandably - were scared that they wouldn't have enough for the next days.

Thankfully though, the guys over at the power plants did an excelent job and power started returning in several regions, one at a time, now at night. I got power a while back.

So... Other than the existencial dread that I got in the morning, it was fine for me personally. Although I can't imagine those that got stuck in metros and elevators and trains.

I got humbled today. We take the internet, TV, power, calls and messages for granted, but today I didn't have access to any of them, and for a while not having them for a few days was a real possibility.

In terms of food and water, I was fine, but I think I'm really going to get one of those survival kits after all, just in case. Hopefully I'll never need it but better prepared than sorry.