What if Spain and Portugal suffer a second grid collapse?
A repeat Iberian voltage-instability cascade blacks out Spain and Portugal, halting industry and rail and nudging EU power/inflation while softening EUR on the activity hit. Direct analogue: the April 2025 Iberian blackout itself, which exposed how low-inertia, inverter-heavy grids lose frequency control. Forward angle: high renewable penetration without enough synchronous inertia or storage is the structural fault line — the macro print is tiny, but it is a live template for grid-stability risk across high-solar systems.
19%
our model probability over 6–18 months
prediction markets — wisdom of the crowd
loading live odds…
◎ Empirically anchored 19%· 90% range 8–30%· 40 analogues · measured class power 89% in 18 mo · 3% held back for the unknownhow we built this number — every step
Measured class rate — power ≈1.4869/yr → 89% in 18 mo89%
Analyst prior · editorial share 20% of the class18%
Pooled · weight 87%19%
Crowd — no liquid market—
Reserve 3% · no extremizing (×1.0)19%
Published19%
The class rate is measured from our dated, sourced event library (decade-normalized Poisson — the full table is public at base_rates.json). The variant’s share within its class is the analyst’s editorial call, published so you can audit it. A wider range means thinner precedent. Full recipe: methodology · scored at Reality Check.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (gold) over time vs the crowd's (Polymarket, blue), from the past toward the 6–18 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. The gold path is an illustrative reconstruction anchored to today's estimate — real dated events, not a live re-estimate history.
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What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A new voltage-instability cascade again blacks out Spain and Portugal, halting industry and rail months after the 2025 outage. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — European energy ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.
If it happens — the markets it would move
Biggest moves first. Projected moves are cascade-model priors; hist A–B% = what comparable past events actually did (measured abnormal returns), and model prior · unmeasured marks markets with no analogue backing yet. Tap any market for its price history.
Market
Class
Projected move
1
EUR/USDEURUSDon Hyperliquid📈 chart
FX
▼ -0.2%
hist -0.57–+0.13% · other way +0.2% (n=6)
Probable recommendation
If the scenario above plays out, the probable cross‑asset positioning → a scenario‑conditional read, not personalized investment advice
For a common-man portfolio: Mixed for a typical portfolio — the move is more about rotation than direction. Favour the winners over the losers below rather than net exposure.
Historical precedent — what analogous events actually did
Across 40 analogous events (overlap‑weighted), as abnormal returns — market beta stripped, so it's the event's own effect, not the market backdrop. Shown at 20 days (persistent) and 5 days (immediate); ↺ fades = the two horizons disagree. Confidence = consistency × sample × significance.
PJM grid emergency during Winter Storm Elliott 2022-12↗Texas grid failure during Winter Storm Uri 2021-02↗California rolling blackouts during a record heatwave 2020-08↗Northeast blackout cascading grid failure hits ~55 million 2003-08↗US intervention removes Maduro in Venezuela 2026-01↗Israel strikes Iran — Operation Rising Lion 2025-06↗Iberian Peninsula total blackout 2025-04↗DeepSeek shock crushes AI-power utilities Vistra and Constellation 2025-01↗Russian gas transit through Ukraine ends 2025-01↗Henry Hub natural gas falls to an all-time inflation-adjusted low on record output 2024-11↗October 2024 Iranian ballistic-missile attack on Israel 2024-10↗Constellation-Microsoft Three Mile Island restart powers AI-utility trade 2024-09↗Hezbollah pager and device explosions across Lebanon 2024-09↗April 2024 Iranian drone-and-missile barrage on Israel 2024-04↗Ukrainian drone strikes hit Russian refineries, lifting crude and gasoline 2024-03↗Biden administration pauses US LNG export approvals 2024-01↗Gabon coup d'etat 2023-08↗Niger coup d'etat 2023-07↗Saudi Arabia adds a unilateral 1 million bpd voluntary cut 2023-06↗Nigeria fuel subsidy removal 2023-05↗Surprise OPEC+ voluntary cut jolts crude higher 2023-04↗OPEC+ announces surprise voluntary cut of ~1.16 million bpd 2023-04↗ExxonMobil posts most profitable year for any US oil company 2023-01↗EU agrees gas price-cap mechanism 2022-12↗OPEC+ cuts output 2 million bpd despite US pressure 2022-10↗EUR/USD hits 20-year low on the energy crisis 2022-09↗Nord Stream pipeline sabotage 2022-09↗European TTF gas hits all-time record high 2022-08↗Henry Hub gas hits 14-year high 2022-08↗Germany agrees Uniper bailout 2022-07↗Gazprom cuts Nord Stream 1 to 40% of capacity 2022-06↗Freeport LNG explosion and shutdown 2022-06↗EDF stress-corrosion crisis cuts French nuclear output 2022-05↗Russia cuts gas to Poland and Bulgaria over ruble demand 2022-04↗US-led 240-million-barrel SPR release answers the Ukraine spike 2022-03↗Houthi drone-and-missile strike on Aramco's Jeddah depot 2022-03↗Germany suspends Nord Stream 2 certification 2022-02↗Houthi drone-and-missile attack on Abu Dhabi oil sites lifts Brent to 7-year high 2022-01↗European gas crisis intraday record spike 2021-10↗China's Sichuan Bitcoin-mining ban completes the 2021 crackdown 2021-06↗
Asset
History says
Abnormal (20d · 5d)
Hit
n
Confidence
vs cascade
10y yieldDGS10
LONG
+16bp · 5d +4bp
68%
40
0.31
·
BitcoinBTC
SHORT
-2.9% · 5d -3.2%
67%
39
0.24
·
US dollarDXY
LONG
+0.8% · 5d +0.2%
59%
40
0.15
·
High-yield creditHYG
SHORT
-0.4% · 5d +0.1% ↺ fades
60%
39
0.14
·
EURUSDEURUSD
SHORT
-0.4% · 5d -0.2%
52%
39
0.04
✓ matches cascade
GoldXAU
SHORT
-0.2% · 5d -0.6%
52%
40
0.04
·
VolatilityVIX
SHORT
-0.1% · 5d -0.5%
41%
40
0.00
·
Why this probability
Iberian repeat possible post-2025 but grid hardened; voltage cascade less likely now. A base‑rate‑anchored prior, continuously scored against what actually happens — not a forecast.