Just before midday on Monday, April 28, Claudia Blanco boarded a flight from Barcelona to Jerez de la Frontera, a small city in Spain’s southernmost region. Blanco, who is the chief innovation and artificial intelligence officer for GE Vernova’s Electrification Systems business, was looking forward to her week. Although her diary was crammed with meetings and deadlines, she was planning to work from her peaceful woodland home, just a 40-minute drive from Jerez’s airport.

But when Blanco landed at around 2 p.m., something didn’t feel right. Her cell phone, which would normally be beeping with messages from friends and family, lay dormant in her hand. The same was happening to her fellow passengers, who looked at one another, shrugging with incomprehension.

At arrivals, they learned the news. At 12:33 p.m., 43 minutes into their journey, the lights on the ground had gone out. In less than sixty seconds, all system parameters of the Spanish and Portuguese electricity systems had collapsed into a blackout. And the blackout was no temporary, isolated blip. In some Spanish regions, power and telecommunications didn’t return until Tuesday morning. “It felt a little apocalyptic,” says Blanco. “I couldn’t contact my family or even pay at the gas station, because they had no power for the credit card terminal.”

Blanco was remarkably well prepared for the crisis. She’d installed a standalone microgrid at her forest retreat in 2024, with solar panels, inverters, batteries, and a generator. Her rural idyll boasts its own natural source of water, free-range chicken coop, and vegetable plot where she also grows potatoes. “I always have electricity, I have fresh eggs for breakfast every morning, and I grow potatoes,” she says. “I could actually survive out here for quite a while.”

So she headed straight to her off-grid sanctuary and waited it out. As darkness fell over Spain and people ate their dinner by candlelight, she made tea, watched TV, and enjoyed a warm bath. It was only when her Wi-Fi returned at 2 a.m. Tuesday morning that she knew the crisis was over.

As Spain and Portugal work to establish the exact cause of the crisis, Blanco is not boasting about her survival skills or urging everyone to adopt an off-grid lifestyle. The GE Vernova executive thinks the Iberian blackout is a wake-up call for the world’s policymakers and power generators. “It’s a reminder of how fragile and electricity-dependent we are,” she says. “We still need to modernize the grid to deal with the very high penetration of renewable power.”

That daunting mission will require cool heads, and plenty of pragmatism, adds Blanco, who has studied transpersonal psychology in Barcelona. “Let’s not get freaked out by this,” she says. “We need to keep ourselves grounded and accelerate the job.”

Wake-up Call

Blanco was shocked by the blackout, but not surprised. She’s a regular on the conference circuit, where she explains how the growth of renewables and the world’s increased reliance on artificial intelligence are upping the ante for power grids. “The grid was never designed for a very high penetration of renewable power,” she says. Renewables-rich networks now need to deal with multidirectional, variable energy and compensate for fluctuating inertia and frequent instability, she explains.

Blanco also points to the proliferation of power-hungry data centers that are delivering the AI revolution as a real challenge. Peak electricity demand from some of the world’s largest sites is set to increase from hundreds of megawatts to several gigawatts in the future. “That makes any system much more fragile,” she says. “Electricity has become a critical asset, and a must for decarbonization plans, so if there’s a blackout, everything will stop.”

Now for some good news. Blanco is optimistic about the world’s will and capacity to fix these issues. “We know what can happen, and every day we know more about how to solve it,” she says. The sticking point is the velocity of problem-solving. “It’s super important to increase the speed of regulation, collaboration, and innovation,” she says. “We need to innovate the way we attract talent — the industry is outdated for new generations.” She points to the sluggish pace of legal approvals for technology, delays to investment in research and development, and overly bureaucratic hiring practices.

Accelerating and cultivating the talent pipeline is a good place to start, she believes. “We should collaborate much more with schools and universities to train technical experts and invest more in these programs.” Retention is also essential. “Talented people are leaving companies after just a few years. We need conscious leaders who harness creativity, allowing people to feel safe in their jobs and enjoy their work.”

Good Networker

That’s how her off-grid hacienda came about. In the 2020s, Blanco grew tired of urban environments after decades of city life. Living out of a suitcase had also taken its toll on Blanco, a former leader in manufacturing engineering and advanced technologies. “I was constantly visiting factories all over the world,” she says. “It was tough to have a normal life.”

She has lived in major cities in France, Vietnam, Brazil, and Spain during her career, and has moved more than 20 times. Things came to a head during the pandemic. Feeling trapped inside her apartment on the outskirts of Barcelona, Blanco searched for a plot of land on which to build a new home. She had a few criteria: “Near ocean and mountains, and in nature,” she says. “I also wanted to live more independently.”

She soon found the perfect plot: a 60,000-square-meter (15-acre) parcel of land near her hometown of Cádiz, boasting its own natural springs and plenty of space for her vegetable patch, two hunting dogs, and a German shepherd. The microgrid was a foregone conclusion, explains Blanco. “I put in my photovoltaics and added battery storage and a generator, in case a blackout ever happened,” she says.

And when that moment came, she was ready. “I felt really safe and secure,” she says. Power grids worldwide can exercise the same vision, innovation, and optimism to put their own houses in order.