Power Outage in Spain

A blackout occurred across the Iberian Peninsula on April 28, 2025, at approximately 12:30 p.m. local time (+0200 UTC). While power was restored by that evening for more than half of the customers who lost electricity, it took almost 23 hours for Spain's electricity grid to be declared back to normal. This nighttime image comparison of the autonomous Andalusia region from April 28 and April 29, 2025, is from the the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard the joint NASA/NOAA NOAA-20 platform. The before and after comparison shows pre-blackout nighttime lights in the early morning of April 28 (left "A" side), and the loss of nighttime lights in the early morning of April 29 in smaller towns and communities (right "B" side).

This image shows a before and after comparison south of Madrid, where smaller communities were still without power in the early morning of April 29. The huge power outage hit Spain, Portugal, and briefly southern France, stopping planes and public transportation and causing hospitals to run on backup generators and suspend routine operations.

The Black Marble Nighttime Blue/Yellow Composite (Day/Night Band) is a false-color composite using the VIIRS at-sensor radiance and the brightness temperatures from the M15 band. Data are provided by NASA's VJ146A1 product using NOAA-20 platform observations.

Originally designed by the U.S. Naval Research Lab and incorporated into NASA research and applications efforts, the Black Marble false-color scheme shows nighttime city lights in shades of yellow with infrared, nighttime cloud presence in shades of blue. During bright moonlight conditions, moonlight reflected from cloud tops and the land surface may also provide a yellow hue to these features. Comparisons of cloud-free conditions before and after a period of significant change, such as new city growth, disasters, fires, or other factors, may exhibit a change in emitted light (yellows) from those features over time.

View more imagery of the blackout in Andalusia at NASA's Earth Observatory.