Earlier that day, a power outage originating in Spain had swept across the Iberian Peninsula and part of France. Traffic lights went down and trains stopped in their tracks, above and below ground. Given that the blackout lasted less than 12 hours, our response in hindsight appears slightly hysterical. But until that update at the supermarket, which we couldn’t verify in any case, we had no way of knowing it would be over so quickly. We had no mobile reception or Internet access of any kind, and so we couldn’t communicate with anyone outside the village.

Much as one would expect in an apocalyptic film, the information flowed just long enough to provide inklings of disaster. On WhatsApp, a fake news story claimed that Russia had launched a massive cyberattack across Europe. Speaking to neighbors, we heard that the cause was in fact some kind of atmospheric phenomenon, affecting not just southern Europe but also, bizarrely, Japan. Apparently, Portugal was going to be without power for days. Then, after an hour or two, our communication channels dried up. Before long, there was no water in the taps.

Anxiety spread quickly. Outside our village, the quiet country road was backed-up with drivers rushing to fill their tanks. Some of the local grocery stores were stripped bare by panic-buyers. We kept our nerve for most of the afternoon, reassuring one another with uneasy jokes and casual speculation. After a while, though, we began asking questions. What if the stores didn’t open in the morning? What if there wasn’t any water left on the shelves? Doesn’t so-and-so down the road have a cistern, a solar panel, a Starlink connection? And so we persuaded ourselves that, actually, we had better err on the side of caution. That’s how we ended up at the supermarket, where two girls stationed at a closed door asked if we had cash, before ushering us inside. That is the nature of radical uncertainty, as typically seen in a bank run: you know you are probably overreacting, but why take the risk?

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Above all, the blackout was a lesson in how utterly dependent modern society is on a product that we never see directly, and rarely think about: the constant, reliable flow of electrons through copper and aluminum wires. The incident has raised serious questions about the future of Europe’s electricity systems. To meet their environmental goals, European countries are trying to electrify large parts of their economies, including cars, household heating and industrial processes. Data centers to provide computing power will mean further, big increases in electricity demand. At the same time, Europe is rapidly switching to renewable energy sources, notably wind and solar, to provide that electricity, and in many cases is shutting down the coal, gas and nuclear-powered alternatives. According to one estimate cited by the Financial Times, government targets mean that electricity will be responsible for 70% of the continent’s energy by 2050, up from around 20% today. More than 90% of that electricity could come from renewables.

This growing dependence on electricity comes with significant risks, including sabotage. Those who suspected hostile actors to be responsible for Monday’s blackout were not merely paranoid. Since the escalation of the war in Ukraine, numerous power cables running under the Baltic Sea have been targeted, prompting Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to disconnect from the Russian grid. Centralized electricity networks are appealing targets for terrorists and adversaries, since bringing them down can paralyze a society, and sow chaos in the process. Thanks to the digitalization of grids, cyberattacks are increasingly plausible, and are in fact being reported with growing frequency.

The shift to green electricity also brings dangers that governments have been slow to mitigate. Battery technology for storing wind and solar power remains ineffective. This means that electricity becomes scarce — and expensive — when there is no wind or sun, but it also means that renewables can, at times, produce too much energy relative to demand, endangering the stability of the grid. By contrast, the output of gas and nuclear plants can be closely controlled to maintain a balanced supply, and their turbines are better at smoothing over disruptions. Last week, at a London conference attended by 60 countries, the International Energy Agency raised these issues as threats to energy security. In a confidential report seen by Bloomberg, the IEA warned against the “premature retirement” of less volatile energy sources that are needed to stabilize grids.

It appears likely that such vulnerabilities triggered the blackout in Spain. The country is a leading adopter of renewable energy, with 72% of its electricity coming from wind and solar in the moments before the outage struck. According to Red Eléctrica de España, the national grid operator, the crisis began when a solar plant in the southwest of the country disconnected suddenly. The cause was probably an oversupply of electricity, combined with a shortage of traditional plants that could have lowered their output in response. And this was foreseen: Red Eléctrica warned in February that, due to a “high penetration of renewable generation”, “severe” outages could be on the horizon.

Though it lasted less than a day, Monday’s power cut will cast a long shadow over the politics of Net Zero. Last year, the Spanish government confirmed its decision to retire the country’s five nuclear power plants, a move criticized by opposition parties on the Right. Unsurprisingly, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez this week vehemently denied that over-reliance on green energy was culpable for the blackout.

An almost identical exchange played out in Britain, with Keir Starmer adopting the same line as Sánchez, while Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch claimed that renewables were likely responsible. The blackout will certainly frighten Starmer’s Labour government, which is pushing for 95% of electricity to come from renewable sources by 2030. After all, the British grid came dangerously close to failure in January, when weak wind and solar generation struggled to meet high winter demand for electricity. The day after the Iberian power cut, former prime minister Tony Blair broke with his party by publicly stating that an ill-conceived rush for Net Zero was inviting a backlash that could “derail the whole agenda” of decarbonization.

Meanwhile, electricity is also creating tensions between European countries. A system dominated by renewables will require a shared electricity market underpinned by an extensive network of transmission cables, allowing electrons to flow from areas with wind and sun to those without. That arrangement is still taking shape, but it’s already apparent that consumers don’t like paying more for electricity because demand is spiking elsewhere. In December, for instance, when Germany and Denmark suffered a period of dark doldrums — cold, cloudy, windless weather — their neighbors baulked at meeting the shortfall in generation. Norway’s governing parties pledged to sever its electricity connections with Denmark, while Sweden demanded that Germany restructure its electricity market to prevent competition from high-demand industrial regions — a request that was backed up this week by the organization overseeing Europe’s grids. The Swedish economy minister also took the opportunity to criticize Germany for voluntarily shuttering its nuclear energy capacity. In France, meanwhile, the opposition National Rally has pledged to exit from the EU’s system of cross-border electricity trading.

The problems posed by renewables are not insurmountable, but they require a measured and honest approach, not a blind dash for quotable statistics. I write this as a supporter of green energy in principle. We should begin with a recognition that, as the energy analyst Javier Blas writes, “grid design, policy and risk mapping aren’t yet up to the task of handling too much power from renewable sources”. Rather than closing down gas and nuclear plants, governments will, for the time being, need more of them to provide resilience and backup sources of electricity. They will need to limit the share of solar and wind generation to prevent grids from becoming fragile. And they will have to upgrade infrastructure to incorporate renewables properly, while improving storage and flexibility.

This will only work if the associated costs and risks are negotiated with the public. Ofgem, Britain’s energy regulator, announced on Wednesday that it would “need hundreds of billions of dollars in investment to build the capabilities needed to run a clean power system and decarbonize the economy”. These upgrades will add further costs to consumers. Seeing your electricity bill go through the roof — even as your local environment is overwhelmed by pylons and solar panels — is bad enough; it is considerably worse when your government refuses to acknowledge there are any downsides to the green transition.

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The political consensus around Europe’s sustainability agenda has been fraying for some time, but more major blackouts will prove fatal. Decarbonization has become so politicized that even if renewables are not actually responsible for the failures in question, they will be discredited by association.

An even more pressing question, though, is how to safeguard against our growing dependence on electricity more generally. The Portuguese town I visited during the blackout showed an impressive degree of resilience, because it could fall back on older technologies. Within hours, uniformed wardens were directing traffic at the gas station, where drivers did manage to refuel their cars. Here and in other local businesses, a key factor was that people still used and accepted cash. Now imagine a scenario in which the majority of vehicles, virtually all payments, and even central heating systems are dependent on electricity. Imagine that government and basic services have become heavily reliant on artificial intelligence software. Adaptation would be more difficult, and the sense of panic considerably greater.

In an ideal world, we would try to ensure that manual and mechanical systems don’t disappear from society entirely, providing a backup to digital and electrical technologies. But this seems overly optimistic. All the more reason, then, for governments to prioritize the robustness and security of our electricity networks, ensuring, among other things, that they stay ahead of the competition in the fast-evolving realm of cybersecurity. As for businesses and communities, a diesel generator or solar module for use in emergencies would not go amiss.

As I quickly realized during the outage in Portugal, what makes such situations different today compared with the recent past is the degree to which we have become conditioned to a constant flow of information. We are now so accustomed to engaging with the news on an hour-by-hour basis, if not a minute-by-minute one, that losing this link to the outside world can be profoundly disorienting and even panic-inducing. When a sudden, unexplained event ruptures the fabric of normality, it soon becomes apparent that the whole edifice of society rests on a fragile foundation of trust. Were a world of media junkies to be plunged into silence, that trust might not last very long.

These episodes of our history have been evoked repeatedly in recent days — even since we heard that, come January, if a Whitehall-devised “reasonable worst case scenario” plays out, the UK will face four days of planned power cuts. If they come, the blackouts will strike industry, rail services, government buildings, even homes — just at the moment when two-thirds of UK households face being driven into fuel poverty by rocketing energy prices. This raises the grim possibility of people struggling to pay bills for a service which, for several days, they won’t even receive.

But if, as a government source insists, this is just contingency planning and is “never going to happen”, why did this story grab so much attention? Because the mere prospect of blackouts conjures images of past national crises — crises which traumatised society, but have also been romanticised.

The possibility of nationally coordinated power cuts only really began with the establishment of the National Grid in 1938, as it stitched the country together with cables and pylons. The Grid had been conceived by the Stanley Baldwin government as a state-backed coordinator of commercial firms — a typically Baldwin-esque compromise between public and private sector, symbolic of his dreams of a moderate, modernising democracy. Baldwin might well have baulked at the state-enforced blackouts of the Second World War, policed by overbearing ARP wardens. But in the face of Nazi attack, this too was a rough-and-ready form of national unity — even if that unity was mainly audible in the universal grumbling at having to put boards over the windows every evening, and then having to stay in. Sticking to and putting up with the blackout became the epitome of the much-mythologised Blitz spirit, not least for those who were never actually bombed.

So in February 1972, when blackouts became a dire necessity for a very different reason, sentimental images of wartime stoicism were readily to hand, waiting to be fired up along with the emergency oil lamps. But this time, the “war” causing the blackouts was between Edward Heath’s government and the National Union of Mineworkers. In pursuit of a pay rise, the NUM turned the electricity supply into the site of an all-out struggle for power. Ministers simply did not anticipate that the miners would mount a highly-organised, startlingly creative campaign. But they found themselves up against “flying” pickets fanning out across the country to close docks, coal depots and especially power stations — including a picket of Battersea Power Station conducted with boats on the Thames, with the aid of a loudhailer. The strike won widespread backing from railway workers and dockers. The ordinary, tedious wiring of everyday life, and the work needed to keep it running, suddenly became political.

And so, with the availability of electricity falling fast, the government was forced to declare a state of emergency, imposing power cuts to push consumption down. Medium-sized firms were shocked to find themselves on a three-day electricity week. A million people were laid off. As though to symbolise the chaos, streetlights started coming on in daylight. Why, moaned the Times, had ministers not seen all this coming? The Central Electricity Generating Board warned that if demand were not reduced, they would have to do “block” cuts, “blacking out large areas indiscriminately”. Hospitals included. Already, a doctor was telling the Mirror that two hospitals had been hit by blackouts with no warning, which could easily have killed patients. Finally, the cabinet, forced to meet by candlelight, gave in.

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Unlike in the Forties, this time the lights going out signified not shared national fortitude, but the overweening power of the unions, and the government’s failure to plan. Heath set up a Civil Contingencies Unit to prepare for future emergencies, and when the miners struck again two years later, he declared a three-day week pre-emptively. But after another round of blackouts, the electorate decided to try Labour instead. Margaret Thatcher vowed that, if and when she faced the miners, the lights would stay on.

The miner’s strikes may be a tale unique to this country, but it wasn’t only Britain struggling to keep the lights on. No blackout captured the political failures of the Seventies more dramatically than the one that struck a near-bankrupt New York City on the sweltering night of 13 July 1977. It’s one of those tales of the American berserk that unfolds almost as neatly as a movie. Unlike Heath’s power cuts, the proximate cause was random — a series of lightning strikes — but the blackout was soon helped along by the failings of the power company, Consolidated Edison. The “night of terror” that followed snapped Gotham’s advancing decay into sharp focus. This was the city of Taxi Driver; there was even a serial killer, “Son of Sam”, roaming the five boroughs. Not an ideal set-up for finding yourself suddenly stuck in a stalled, pitch-black subway train, let alone a lift. The city was already drowning in a crime wave; now looting raged. The main source of light in some areas was provided by the many zealous arsonists. Like its mobs, New York’s politicians were held to have completely lost control. The Mayor, Abe Beame, blamed Consolidated Edison, but, like Heath’s, his career was flickering out.

Today, the blackout remains a shorthand for political calamity, for Left and Right alike. In 2015, when a writer for the Mail on Sunday sketched out the horrors of a future Corbyn-run Britain, along with rationing and riots, the doomsday scenario duly included the lights going out. In 2019, in his BBC TV series Years and Years, Russell T. Davies imagined the authoritarian populist Britain of 2028 — complete with a power cut-inducing cyberattack. Whether the attack is internal or external, the blackout captures like nothing else the knowledge that millions of total strangers and the government are all wired up together, and that it may not end well.

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But what’s really striking is that the lights going out isn’t just a harbinger of the apocalypse: the idea is creative. Once theatres could be lit electrically, it did not take all that long for writers and directors to spot the imaginative possibilities. Plunging a scene suddenly into darkness could hammer home a punchline, underline an irony, or send up characters’ helplessness. Mid-century stage thrillers loved to snap the stage to black, with gunshots and screams to follow. The playwright Peter Shaffer forged an entire comedy — called, inevitably, Black Comedy — out of the conceit of showing actors stumbling around in a blackout, but with the theatre lights on full. RF Delderfield’s play Worm’s Eye View made light of the difficulties of trying to meet wartime blackout rules by taking out a bulb. One actor who appeared in it, David Baron, turned a similar scene into something much more sinister once he started writing under his real name, Harold Pinter. In his pioneering early plays like The Birthday Party and The Caretaker, blackouts dramatise how instantly a hostile world can turn on you.

Yet equally, they open up radical possibilities. In her 2006 novel, The Night Watch, Sarah Waters re-imagines the blackouts of the Second World War not only as a frightening nuisance, but as a liberation from prying eyes. A lesbian couple can do things in a pitch-black London doorway that become impossible again in peacetime. The darkness also opened up freedoms for women who preferred male callers. Amid all the accounts of fear and trauma from the 1977 New York blackout, and the enthusiasm of the looters and arsonists, there is also the voice of a young woman rhapsodising that the experience was “far out!” For good or ill, this curious phenomenon defamiliarises the everyday, casting it in a strange new (lack of) light. Like plays, movies and fiction, blackouts signal that the hard limits framing how we live may not be quite so solid after all.

So perhaps that’s one reason why the shadow of blackouts this winter catches our imagination. As in 1972, the boring, taken-for-granted wiring of everyday life is becoming political. Our current blackout scenario centres on a new cable under the North Sea, which sends hydroelectric power to the UK from a Norwegian power station — but may send rather less if Norway’s low water levels force it to prioritise domestic energy production. This is suddenly something that might affect whether we can work or cook — like the standards of maintenance of French nuclear reactors, which may also leave the UK short of power.

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For critics of current energy policy, all this draws attention to a series of long unremarked political choices, which are now registering in the unnerving mix of rocketing prices and possible blackouts. Professor Richard Jones, formerly of the Industrial Strategy Commission, points to the UK’s increased reliance on gas imports to meet our overall energy needs, as North Sea production has declined. At the same time, more countries have started competing to buy gas. Cross-continental pipelines have opened up a global gas market — to which, Professor Jones suggests, we have chosen to leave ourselves highly exposed, in the belief that the market is the best means to access cheap energy. In the Seventies, the UK was deeply dependent on domestic coal and its workforce; now we are dependent on the vagaries of foreign gas supply. So even though the UK is not supplied directly by Russia, President Putin’s withholding of gas still threatens us.

Others blame the Cameron government’s 2013 decision to roll back investment in energy efficiency and renewable domestic energy sources, or, conversely, the green levy. The Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy insists that UK supplies are diverse and secure. But former Downing Street chief adviser Dominic Cummings argued recently that “Westminster’s disastrous handling of energy” goes back well beyond the current government, and that “a blackout would belatedly lay bare the consequences of our under-investing ways”.

If the worst-case scenario does happen, it may be that we choose to cast this as another Blitz, and stoically put up with it. But its impact could yet turn out to be more like what happened in the wake of the power cuts of the Seventies. For politicians, and eventually much of the public, in the years after the 1972 miners’ strike, the blackouts highlighted the folly of giving an increasingly radical union the power to shut off the country’s supplies, and the government’s failure to plan far enough ahead to avoid them. Perhaps, in time, a new series of power cuts will come to seem like a rare moment of romance in our wired-up, screen-saturated lives. But in the meantime, blackouts may once again cast a shadow over some long-accepted political choices.

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Phil Tinline’s most recent series, Pay Freezes, is available on BBC Sounds. His book The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares has just been published by Hurst.