‘Shipwrecked in the 21st century’: how people made it through Europe’s worst blackout in living memory
We went shopping.
Oven and cook top are electric. So, off we went and bought a bbq. Which we need anyway. Plus some charcoal. So we had hamburgers. OK. Wifey did insist on something to boil water as well – we’d not want to have to wait for fire up the barbie to boil water for morning coffee. So, €20 on a little gas camping stove.
And that was it really. So not hugely exciting.
We did find that one supermarket chain – Continente – is v well prepared. Their tills were still working. And the multibanco payment systems were – couldn’t get cash from the hole in the wall but could pay by card. Not that that mattered to us I had, as I usually do, a couple of hundred cash.
But it was possible to see how buying panics start. So, while we’re buying the bbq in one shop someone in hte line to pay says “The supermarket’s run out of water” so everyone in that line picks up another 20 to 30 litres of water. Some were buying 100 litres etc. No stocking system can really deal with that sort of immediate spike in demand. Stripping the shelves bare etc.
Saw the same thing with the bread (bread is a bv important part of the P diet) in the supermarket that had power. People buying 3 and 5 days supplies, vast piles of rolls and loaves. Yet the supermarket had enough power that it was still baking fresh. The mass buying wasn’t – perhaps = wholly logical. But again we can see how just a twitch in the system can lead to shelves stripped bare.
All of which is why, of course, economists like rationing by price. If the supermarket had couble, tripled, the price of bread then perhaps the shelves wouldn’t have been bare. Folk would have taken what was needed, not hoarded.
Yes, you’re right, there are many social reasons why the supermarket didn’t. And even some of the complaints – but only the rich can get bread! – have validity too. And yet by hte standards the economists care about it does in fact work. How do we pread available – and now limited – supply over current demand? Change prices because that’s efficient. It makes people think about how much they actually do need and so limits that demand on that limited supply.
Whether the answer’s “right” is a bigger question than the economics. But within economics it’s a pretty good answer.
Pleased you survived the zombie apocalypse relatively unscathed.
I hope this is the start of the downfall for Net Zero – now the average peeps see how it can significantly mess up their life. Comments yesterday from Blair should help too.
Be very careful about Blair. He’s advocating hideously expensive carbon capture and storage. And the green mullahs won’t give up without a fight, so we will probably end up with a watered-down version of Nut Zero that will spread the lunacy over another couple of decades.
The global left have a range of policies – net zero, mass immigration, gender fluidity, human rights, educational indoctrination, linguistic policing, etc – designed to destroy the capitalist democracies they hate. If they spin their policies more effectively and appear to modify them, they will appear reasonable and balanced to the gullible – but stronger in maintaining the most effective wrecking schemes.
It’s about the only situation in which the word “deprived” is accurate: the panic bulk-buyers deprive others of goods by buying them all up.
I remember all the panic buying of pasta during the lockdowns. Barely a packet left on the shelves. Except for some strange shaped pasta which was obvioulsy putting people off.
Plenty of oats, rice, instant mash and other starchy carbs. Just no pasta.
As if not having pasta could lead to something terrible. Likely people who had never bought pasta before had kilos of it in their cupboards.
You remind me of my bread shortage during the Brisbane floods a while ago.
My judgement was that there’d be no problems if everyone just followed their normal buying patterns. But of course they didn’t.
So I ended up buying an expensive loaf of some ‘special’ bread during the first week of the fuss, and a more expensive than usual loaf of white bread on the second.
Obviously I should have paid attention to the rumours of shortages mentioned in the news and done as everyone else did. No doubt I’d have then been able to buy my favourite loaf of multigrain.
Yes, dynamic pricing of supermarket produce would be great, but as the queues for bread and water built up you’d need a computer and a robot to change the display prices, which couldn’t work due to the power cut.
I presume the generator is set up to prioritise the freezers, fridges and the tills. Seems to have worked.
In times of shortage, the government could implement dynamic pricing based on intersectional hierarchy of the customer base (white males last in queue).
Just needs everyone to wait 12 months for the consultations to be done and the civil service to get around to it.
Bad luck if you starved in the meanwhile.
“Be very careful about Blair. He’s advocating hideously expensive carbon capture and storage.”
Which is a very good reason to let them try. They’ll soon a) find its very difficult and expensive, and b) run out of money. When politics comes down to the choice of ‘do we spend more on the NHS or welfare, or pay it to multinational companies to try and extract cucumbers from sunbeams’ I know which one wins. Net Zero only ‘works’ in cash terms if the State gets it for ‘free’ by supressing the consumption of the masses. If it is a stand alone technology project that consumes cash at a rate of knots and has to compete with all the other demands on the public purse it will soon get relegated to the ‘well maybe if we win the lottery’ pile, and die a natural death.
Jim: That seems to be happening now with the ‘Hydrogen’ economy. H2 buses, aircraft, cars, trains, you name it. If you googled the properties of hydrogen and then thought hard for a moment or two you would realise it’s a non-starter, but the pols don’t do that, and grifters will split between those who don’t and those who do. So there’s been plenty of our money wasted on this, and I’m glad that seems to be coming to an end.
Surprised you didn’t already have an alternative to electric Tim. We have a big gas fueled barbecue on the terrace with a side burner for pots but I’ve also been toting a two burner portable around for years with a camping size bottle. So we were drinking our coffee at 8am prior to going out shopping. After I’d filled every available container with water. First purchase? 400 fags. Thing like this goes on very long, money will rapidly become useless. So have something to barter. We’d be eating mostly meat for a few days as the freezers warmed. Although running the bbq closed would dry some for long term. We bought flour wheat/maize/manioca & bicarb for flatbreads & a lot of canned stuff. Spent a few hundred. Not wasted. It’ll all be used.
It’s a calculation. Shit happens. This could have gone on for a week. Or longer. Worst case they never get it back up. Low probability but worth spending something as insurance. Why I already had the two burner & its gas. And a means of protecting ourselves 🙂 (We went out around 11pm, see what was happening. We could see streetlights along the coast, was reassuring. But there were already street robberies occurring we were told. They’re quite welcome to try with us. We could probably show a profit) Higher probabilities are worth spending more to prepare for & so on. But pessimism is a survival trait. And it’s not as if power outages are rare here. Spanish seem to manage them regularly. And there are always other possibilities.
Paul, Somerset
April 27, 2025 at 2:36 pm
… I reckon there’s a reason our rulers quietly relented the other day, and allowed wood burners to be installed in new-builds: they know what’s coming.
________
If only I’d had that sort of prescience at Brighton races yesterday afternoon.
Not 8AM! 3PM I was recalling later.
Wetting my finger and holding it up in the wind, I reckon the American MSM will try to spark panic-buying in the US, to spite Trumpy. Brits watching the news may then panic too. So it’s time to stock up on corned beef and bog rolls. And we’ll check the sardine stocks.
How is the toilet roll situation in Portugal, Tim?
If they really don’t want to recycle some more free-range organic dinosaurs, they could always mix their hydrogen with some carbon and store it that way. I hear that burns quite nicely in engines too.
Interestingly I was reading an article around the welcome downfall of Klaus Schwab but it made me think that it doesn’t really make much of a difference – I sincerely hope that Jimmers and others are correct and that the penny is dropping around ‘Nut Zero’ but the people pushing this crap are still in place. They have total control of the media and education system, and control of the legal system and judiciary. Do we really think they will gave that up easily?
Could you imagine the equivalent blackout in the UK but on a cold dark late afternoon, probably 5:30 in early December. No heating (the gas boiler needs electricity), no light and no guarantee how long water will keep flowing out of the tap. Folks with PV solar panels find they do nothing unless their system is one of the very small percentage with batteries and a mains switch-over system.
A trip to the local shops won’t get you a BBQ or cooking stove as the space where they would be sold the following year is full of Christmas lights.
“Could you imagine the equivalent blackout in the UK but on a cold dark late afternoon, probably 5:30 in early December. No heating (the gas boiler needs electricity), no light and no guarantee how long water will keep flowing out of the tap.”
You’re pretty spot on, because it nearly happened in January this year at 5:30pm.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/09/britain-came-within-whisker-blackouts-national-grid/
A Grid failure in winter in the UK would be a serious crisis, far greater than spring in Spain. If it coincided with a cold snap (which is highly likely as windless conditions are usually correlated with cold in winter) it could easily spiral into a total catastrophe.
I’d agree with the general tenor of ‘a renewables-mostly grid is fragile’ but not with any suggestion that Mad Ed and friends will reverse course and fix it.
Seems to me the only sensible thing to do is make private arrangements for power, which should be of the sort that allow adding capacity as things get worse. So in Tejas, I might well actually get around to installing a few kW of solar and one Tesla Powerwall or equivalent; heating is gas, cooktop is gas, house is well-insulated, so a battery won’t have massive demands. Alas, the property in Normandy would be disfigured by adding solar panels, but I think I’m going to look at a battery – we’re 100% electric here so rather exposed but we don’t plan to be here when its really cold.
Don’t know at all what I would do were I to be trapped in Keir’s earthly paradise…
Jim
But I think both the Great Reset and Great Replacement will be sped up if a load of elderly, mostly white pensioners are killed by a power outage. Let no one think there isn’t design here. The current government, which I think it’s now widely agreed is the worst in human history, hates every white man in the country that is English with the kind of fanaticism the SS hated Jews, maybe more so.
3 to 5 days supply?
Isn’t Portugal one of the countries where they go buy bread every day? Does it even keep that long?
Talk about panic.
Not so much out in the country, no. “Pao Alentejano” is good solid heavy stuff that keeps a few days. Wasn’t all that long back that you’d bake it at home in a wood fired oven (like, 40 to 50 years back) and you don’t fire up a bread oven every day.
@BlokeInTejasInNormandy
That’s a viable solution, though it would be hugely expensive to roll out that model at national scale. A multitude of individual systems doesn’t benefit from scale in the same way solar farms do. It is however the way rich people will be able to respond to the threat of electricity disruption due to bad policy. Something along those lines is already common in South Africa.
Dunno about extracting cucumbers from sunbeams, but my project to extract potatoes from sunbeams is running quite well. I forecast I’ll see good results in early September. 🙂
“Change prices because that’s efficient. It makes people think about how much they actually do need and so limits that demand on that limited supply.”
Also encourages people to supply that market at the higher prices, thereby pushing prices back down again.
@Jim – “They’ll soon … b) run out of money.”
That’s my money, so no, don’t let them try.
“That’s my money, so no, don’t let them try.”
They’ve already run out of money, so adding carbon capture to the long list of things they can’t afford will be to our benefit. The added advantage of just throwing money at the problem is that it can easily be reversed by another government, just cancel the project. Net Zero that involves changing the way everybody lives cannot be so easily reversed. If the gas grid has been shut down, no-one is going to invest in reopening it. Car plants and steel mills that have closed won’t be re-opened. Oil rigs that have been decommissioned aren’t coming back. Covid has shown that the economy is not something you can turn off and on again. Whatever the Net Zero cult destroys today isn’t coming back in the future.
AndyF
“That’s a viable solution, though it would be hugely expensive to roll out that model at national scale. ”
You mean like private cars can’t match the efficiency of public transport?
I think that with modern semiconductor tech, it may soon be cheaper to have “individual power stations” – at least, where there’s adequate sunshine – than build and maintain a grid reliant on ‘renewables’….