55 million. That’s the number of people who lost power during the blackout in the Iberian Peninsula. Transport came to a standstill, surgeries were postponed, teachers taught in the dark, families ate by candlelight. Onlookers described it as “post-apocalyptic.”
The saga was a brutal reminder that no modern society is as self-sufficient as it thinks. We are a civilisation dependent on energy.
When the grid goes down, the hyper-connected modern systems that power our modern lives collapse. For a country focused on driving growth, this is a stark reminder for the UK that we cannot build a future-proofed society without resilience infrastructure.
The human toll of these catastrophic power cuts is hard to quantify. But the economic consequences are already becoming apparent….
