Introduction Yesterday afternoon, I was writing what should have been the regular newsletter when the power suddenly went out. I wasn’t alarmed at all because I live in a mountain area, and power outages like this happen several times a year. It was a slightly windy day, so I assumed that maybe a tree had cracked and hit a low-voltage line or something similar. But, as it turns out, that wasn't the case. Instead, something unprecedented occurred, a 'zero energy' event: the power grid in Spain and Portugal went down completely. As we can see from the following graph coming from Red Eléctrica Española (transmission system operator responsible for managing the Spanish electricity system), at 12:35pm suddenly 15 GW of generation power went 'missing'. As the prime minister would explain during a press release: "in 5 seconds, 60% of the country's demand disappeared from the system". The interconnected power system is one of the most complex systems ever b...