Fact-Check Dispatch: Edited space pictures, old content and incorrect captions flourish in Spanish blackout
Issue 18 of the Fact-Check Dispatch
Over 55 million people across Spain, Portugal, and parts of southern France were thrust into darkness as one of the most significant power outages in recent European history unfolded on April 28.
The blackout, which lasted for much of the day, brought daily life to a standstill, with transportation systems, hospitals, and communication networks across the Iberian Peninsula among the most severely affected.
Spain’s grid operator, Red Eléctrica de España (REE), initially ruled out a cyberattack but pointed to a failure stemming from two solar plants in the southwest of the country, which destabilised the power system and led to a cascading breakdown in the interconnectivity with France.
While electricity has been restored, the cause of the outage remains under investigation. As authorities combed for answers, the incident gave rise to a wide range of misinformation online, from misrepresented content to wild conspiracy theories emerging about the cause of the outage.
Here’s our fact-check dispatch.
Altered space images used in coverage of blackout
As social media users and even news organisations scrambled to find images to illustrate the power outage, several photos captured from space showing the Iberian Peninsula in darkness came to the fore.
Whether it’s smoke from burning wildfires, urban lighting visible from space, or damage after a natural disaster, satellite imagery and photographs shared by astronauts can be an invaluable asset. But, of course, only when they’re correct.
One of the images shared soon after the power cut appeared to have been shot from the International Space Station. It showed Spain in darkness, with lights in other countries clearly visible.
The image was even run by an Argentinian news outlet as part of its coverage of the story.
Derek Bowler from the EBU analysed the image and found a few interesting things. The lights in Spain were visible, but darkened compared to neighbouring countries. The picture also showed a perfect cutline on the border of Spain and Portugal, despite the lights being visible on both sides. This indicated that a darkening filter had been applied to Spain.
Using Google Lens, Bowler was able to find an article by NASA from 2014, showing the original image in which Spain was illuminated just like anywhere else. It was captured in July, 2014, by crew members on board the International Space Station.
Other images were also used similarly. VerificaRTVE in Spain, which checked a lot of the content being widely shared around this domestic story, found this image apparently captured from space that was falsely captioned as showing the blackouts.
The RTVE team found that the image was likely AI-generated, through analysis via two AI detection tools. The image also shows France in complete darkness, which did not happen during the power cuts that mainly affected Spain, Portugal, and parts of southern France.
And there was yet another satellite image being shared around, this time showing all of Spain and Portugal in darkness. It also showed the Balearic Islands without power, even though those islands were unaffected by the blackout.
The team at RTVE picked up on another detail that proved the image was not genuine. Night fell at 9:32 p.m. on the night of the power cut, and by then, about 35% of the power supply in A Coruña had been recovered. “If this were a real picture, lights should be visible in that area,” the team at RTVE write.
VerificaRTVE also debunked several other instances of misinformation that emerged during the power outages, from fraudulent scams to circulating messages that falsely claimed Ursula von der Leyen had called it a Russian attack. There were also suggestions that Israel or the U.S. were behind the blackout, but no evidence was provided.
The proliferation of these types of images show just how easy it is to fake or alter a space image to depict a power outage, and why we should be on the lookout for this genre the next time a similar story emerges.
Did too much solar power trigger the blackout?
If you were following news of the power outage, you may have come across screenshots of graphs and diagrams showing fluctuating lines and a nosedive just as the electricity went out.
Many of these were shared with claims about Spain’s reliance on renewable energy, specifically that an oversupply of solar power may have triggered the sudden failure.
The claim was posted by someone described as a physicist, who wrote: “Renewables, in this case solar, have just caused the first major #power outage in Spain, specifically due to an oversupply of solar.” That post included screenshots which cited German chemistry professor and energy transition critic, Fritz Vahrenholt, who said that renewable energy production in Spain had surpassed demand before the grid outage.
Jan D. Walter looked into the theory for Deutsche Welle. He writes that the head of the Spanish grid operator REE, Eduardo Prieto, addressed other claims in ruling out a cyberattack in the immediate aftermath of the blackout, but gave some further analysis on what actually happened leading up to the incident.
“According to Prieto, two separate incidents in southwest Spain within 1.5 seconds apparently caused the grid frequency to become so unbalanced that power plants with a capacity of 15 gigawatts (GW) failed in a very short time - almost half of the power plant capacity active at the time.”
Walter goes on to write: “Very large and sudden deviations can lead to a cascade of errors. An extreme frequency fluctuation triggers mechanisms at other power plants (and large consumers), which then automatically disconnect these plants from the grid.” Prieto said it was “very possible” that this fluctuation could have been triggered by solar power plants.
However, as Walter writes, the cause of the power outage remained unclear and it was not yet possible to prove that an oversupply of solar energy caused the blackout. It is true that solar energy was providing some 60% of the electricity in the Spanish grid, and solar plants seem to dominate electricity production particularly in southern Spain, where the faults were recorded.
Since then, new information has come to light. On Monday, Environmental Transition Minister Sara Aagesen told Spanish national broadcaster TVE that there was a “third loss of power generation” that came 19 seconds before the blackout, adding to the two that were already known about. The grid withstood this first fluctuation, but not the other two that came five seconds before the outage.
The minister said: “So far, we know that this new incident 19 seconds earlier occurred in southern Spain, and the following two occurred in the southwest.” The government is not ruling out a cyberattack.
It’s difficult for journalists to delve into such a scientific topic when all of the information is not yet clear. But as this story shows, what we can do is use the information that is publicly available, to at least show that the claim can’t yet be proven.
Miscaptioned content amid power cut panic
As with most major breaking stories, the power outage also generated lots of social media posts featuring old, fake, and miscaptioned images.
For Belgium’s VRT nws check, Nele Baeyens, Ellen Debackere and Daan Nicolay looked into some of the content that spread around platforms in the hours after the incident.
One such photo showed people resting on an escalator, with a caption: “Image of Belgians stuck on an escalator due to the power outage in Europe.” The post had over 200,000 views. But it wasn’t true. A reverse image search showed it was already in use in France in 2021.
Other videos showed black smoke spewing out of chimneys, purporting to show explosions at a refinery in Biscay, and accompanied by claims about a “massive cyberattack”.
VerificaRTVE researched the incident, finding that Petronor, the company operating the refinery, published a statement clarifying that they were standard “safety measures” to release pressure.
There was more detail from the local fire department, which confirmed it recorded the smoke emissions and said they were “not accidents”. The Bomberos Bizkaia released this footage showing the situation, writing: “With the widespread power outage there have been many #rescues of people trapped in lifts and calls of industrial accidents. Companies put their production processes in ‘protection’. They are not accidents, it’s safety.”
The RTVE team further cited local reporting that said the refinery units were shut down due to the power outage, and then the safety measures were activated.
But that wasn’t all. A photograph also emerged of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and ministers gathered around a meeting table, claiming it showed a committee meeting over the power cut.
It actually shows a Council of Ministers meeting in January, and has no connection to the blackout. The reporters at RTVE were able to verify this by conducting a reverse image search, where they found the image published by the Spanish National Council. There was a meeting convened to deal with the power cut, but this wasn’t it.
The use of unrelated images and the incorrect captioning of real footage is nothing new, and comes up whenever we see a major story break into public discourse. As these stories show, sometimes all you need is a critical eye, some healthy suspicion of everything online, and a reverse image search.