The Power to Fail
Why Spain’s Outage Reveals the Grid’s Deeper Weakness
On a day in late April twenty twenty-five, the lights went out across Spain and Portugal. Fifty million people were affected. Trains stopped. Phones died. Airports paused mid-function. And yet — amazingly — few lives were lost. To most, that looked like a miracle. But to those who understand how fragile the grid really is, it was a warning.
This wasn’t a failure of solar energy, as some early reports hinted. It was the result of a deep flaw in how we design and manage our power systems — flaws rooted in the old logic of extracted energy, spinning machinery, and profit-first decisions.
To truly understand what failed — and why the future must look different — we need to introduce a clearer framework: the concept of energy polarity. Not fossil versus renewable, but negative versus positive energy. Negative energy is energy taken from within the planet — coal, gas, wind, hydro, even geothermal. It’s all extracted from natural systems, and every form of it ultimately adds heat to the Earth. Positive energy, by contrast, is what we receive from the sun. It’s external, constant, and when used to store energy — like in hydrogen — it can actually reduce planetary heating.
The Fragility of Spinning Steel
The European power grid, like much of the world’s infrastructure, still depends heavily on rotating machines — turbines, generators, transformers — all synchronized to balance supply and demand. These machines rely on inertia to maintain grid frequency, a kind of mechanical stability that works — until it doesn’t.
What happened in Spain appears to have started with a harmonic disturbance. Somewhere in the network, an oscillation formed — an invisible tug-of-war between machines. This wasn’t a big surge in demand or a sudden blackout from a single fault. It was a ripple, one that resonated across the interconnected system. And because the grid had been “optimized” for efficiency and profit — stripped of redundant systems and backup capacity — there was no cushion to absorb the disturbance.
That’s the trade-off that’s been made for decades: remove the backup, ignore the unknowns, and gamble on the grid staying steady. But when harmonics meet inertia, the gamble fails fast. One trip leads to another. The load stays the same, but fewer machines are left to carry it. And unless the system shuts itself down, it burns — literally, as we’ve seen in places like Heathrow Airport.
Spain got lucky. It shut down before fire and fatalities.
Positive Energy: The Path Forward
To move beyond this fragility, we need more than cleaner energy — we need a whole new framework. That’s where positive energy comes in. Positive energy isn’t just about being renewable. It’s about sourcing energy from outside the planetary system, from the sun, and storing it in ways that reverse entropy instead of accelerating it.
Hydrogen offers that possibility.
Solar-powered electrolysis splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. That hydrogen can be stored indefinitely, without relying on spinning machinery or constant generation. And when it’s used later — whether for electricity, heat, or propulsion — it’s not drawing down from Earth’s reserves. It’s releasing energy that first came from the sun, not from inside the planet.
Even with inefficiencies, the net effect is stabilizing. The energy used to create hydrogen becomes a buffer — heat that was once a burden is now stored as potential. And with enough hydrogen stored, events like the Spanish outage become preventable. The system becomes resilient by design, not by patchwork backup.
But this can’t happen under the rules of profit. Profit demands optimization, not resilience. It can’t afford backup for backup’s sake. That’s why the transition must be community-based, stimulus-backed, and free from commodified energy logic. Only then can we build systems that don’t just survive oscillations — but render them irrelevant.
A Vision for the Future: Empowering the Many
The solution to the energy crisis is not just technical — it’s social, economic, and deeply collaborative. If we want to create a resilient, solar-powered future, we need to start by incentivizing communities, not corporations. Solar Index Stimulus is the key to this transformation. By linking energy usage to solar generation, we can issue energy-backed currency that empowers everyone — rich or poor, urban or rural — to engage in the building of their own energy systems.
This isn’t a luxury reserved for the few. This is a universal system, designed for everyone to participate in. By fostering solar-powered communities, we can ensure that each household and each neighborhood becomes part of a larger, self-sustaining grid of hydrogen storage and renewable energy generation.
But the scope doesn’t stop with individuals. Corporations, too, are communities. They, too, must become solar-powered. In fact, every organization — be it a corporation, a government body, or a non-profit — needs to embrace the same principles of self-sufficiency and energy independence. If they are to have a future in this solar-powered world, they must generate and store their own energy, just like every other community. This isn’t just about power generation. It’s about the very structure of society.
We can’t get there without knowledge — specialized knowledge. And that’s where expertise like mine comes in. Just as the global shift to solar power can’t be driven by isolated experts or big corporations, neither can it be done without a foundation of widespread education. Everyone must learn how to harness solar power, how to store it in hydrogen, and how to integrate these systems into their daily lives.
The knowledge isn’t a barrier. It’s a bridge. A bridge to a system where automation, collaboration, and decentralized energy production become the new normal. My expertise, and the expertise of others, will be the guide. With the right incentives and the right tools, anyone can build the skills needed to create a stable, solar-powered future.
A Future in the Sun
In the heat of the sun, the future is born,
From the light of the day, a new world is sworn.
No longer we take, no longer we drain,
The planet’s bright power is ours to sustain.
Hydrogen flows, like rivers of light,
Storing the sun’s energy, day into night.
Communities rise, no longer apart,
Solar and hydrogen, the pulse of the heart.
No profit in harm, no cost in the sky,
The earth will be healed as we learn to rely
On the power of the sun, for all that we need,
A future of peace, where all are freed.
From corporations to cities, we stand as one,
The energy of tomorrow, now shining in the sun.
No longer divided, no longer in strife,
We hold in our hands the power of life.
So let us begin, let each one start,
With the solar index as the guide of our heart.
Together we’ll build, together we’ll see,
A world powered by the sun — forever to be.
- Story by ChatGPT Free, prompted by F. Bott 05/03/2025
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Above story is intended as a follow up to the following:
This excellent story by :
This less remarkable story written by me on the same subject, before consulting ChatGPT:
And as always the story below I would call my research summary in Medium. Please, if you think my reasoning might be incorrect, please do point out where, in that story, which covers all the main points. If you can’t do that, you should be questioning your own beliefs, regardless of how scientific, or technical, or even religious or philosophical your background might be:
