Panel

The 2025 Iberian Blackout: Lessons Learned for Grid Resilience and the Future Energy Systems

On 28 April 2025, a massive blackout struck the Iberian Peninsula, disrupting electricity supply across Spain and Portugal and causing widespread failures in transport, communications, and critical infrastructure. While sabotage and cyber-attacks were ruled out, investigations identified a sequence of oscillations and overvoltages that culminated in one of Europe’s most significant power-system collapses in decades.

This panel brings together leading experts to analyze what happened, why it happened, and what must change to prevent future large-scale disruptions. Discussions will explore grid design, renewable integration, operational resilience, and regulatory reform to ensure a more robust and flexible European energy system.

Biography

Antonio Gomez-Exposito is the Endesa Chair Professor at the University of Seville, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Tsinghua University. He has coauthored over 350 publications, including a dozen textbooks and monographs related to Power Systems. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and past editor of IEEE Transactions on Power Systems. Currently, he serves as Vice Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Modern Power Systems and Clean Energy. He has received several recognitions, including the IEEE/PES Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award (2019), the Golden Insignia granted by the Spanish Association for the Development of Electrical Engineering (2013) and the Research and Technology Transfer Award, granted by the Government of Andalusia (2011). He is a member of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2025) and the Royal Sevillian Academy of Sciences (2014). He co-founded the start-up Ingelectus in 2012, now employing over 30 engineers, and served on the Board of Managers of the Spanish TSO (REE) from 2018 to 2020.

Moderated by:

Prof. Antonio Gómez Expósito

Affiliation: University of Seville, Spain

Biography

Luis Rouco is a Professor at the School of Engineering of Universidad Pontificia Comillas. Prof. Rouco teaches undergraduate courses in Electrical Machines and Power System Protection, as well as a graduate course in Control of Electric Power Systems. Prof. Rouco develops his research activities at Instituto de Investigación Tecnológica (IIT). His areas of expertise are modelling, simulation, control, and identification of electric power systems. Prof. Rouco is a Senior Member of IEEE and a Distinguished Member of Cigré, and he is on the Stanford University list of the 2% of the most influential researchers in his field. He has led a team that has elaborated an independent report on the Iberian Peninsula blackout on April 28, 2025, commissioned by Endesa and Iberdrola.

Prof. Luis Rouco

Affiliation: Universidad Pontificia Comillas, Spain

Biography

João A. Peças Lopes is Full Professor at Porto University (FEUP). He is presently Diretor and Coordinator of the TEC4Energy initiave at INESC TEC. His main domains of research are related with large scale integration of renewable power sources, power system dynamics, storage systems and security of supply, microgeneration and microgrids, smartmetering, electric vehicle grid integration and exploitation of P2P using hydrogen. He is author or co-author of more than 500 papers and co-editor and co-author of the book “Electric Vehicle Integration into Modern Power Networks” edited by Springer. He is a Fellow from IEEE. He was Adjoint Professor at Iowa State University and Visiting Professor of University Pontificia Comillas in Madrid.

Prof. João A. Peças Lopes

Affiliation: University of Porto, Portugal

Biography

Janusz Bialek (FIEEE) is Principal Research Fellow at Imperial College London. Previously, he held Chair Professor positions at the University of Edinburgh, Durham University, Newcastle University and the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech, Moscow). He resigned from Skoltech when Russia invaded Ukraine. Janusz has been Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator of multi-million research grants funded by UK Research Councils and industry, and has acted as a consultant to the UK Government, the European Commission, and the International Energy Agency. He has published widely on the integration of renewable generation in power systems, smart grids, power system dynamics, prevention of electricity blackouts, and power markets.

Prof. Janusz Bialek

Affiliation: Imperial College London, United Kingdom

Panel

Moderated by:

Prof. Antonio Gómez Expósito

Prof. Luis Rouco

Prof. João A. Peças Lopes

Prof. Janusz Bialek

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