Airports are machines that need steady electricity. Pilots and controllers see the consequences immediately when runway lights flicker, instrument landing aids go offline, or tower comms lose redundancy. ICAO makes this plain: aerodromes must provide secondary power for visual and radio aids and keep switch over times to seconds for safety critical lighting and systems. Meeting the letter of those standards is necessary but not always sufficient when the public grid experiences rapid, large swings in supply or when supply routes share a single point of failure.
The Iberian system has been changing fast. Spain has added large volumes of solar and wind capacity in recent years, shifting the generation mix and creating new operational challenges for transmission system operators. Higher renewable penetration improves emissions but also raises the bar for grid management, especially for voltage control and inertia services that used to be supplied by thermal plants. Those changes mean airports, even big hubs, can no longer treat the grid as an uninterrupted commodity. They must plan for variability and for rare but high-impact events that cascade into terminals, aprons, and ATC centres.
European planning recognizes the need to strengthen cross-border links and add grid flexibility, but interconnection projects and storage rollouts take years. Regional network plans identify interconnectors and storage as priorities to smooth flows and reduce isolation, yet implementation timetables are multi-year. That lag leaves the responsibility for immediate resilience on airports, ANSPs, and local authorities. In short, the continent is working on systemic fixes, but operators cannot wait for distant projects to mature.
From the flight-deck perspective the operational requirements are straightforward and brutally practical. Prioritize three things first: keep the landing aids working, keep ATC comms alive, and preserve apron lighting for safe pushbacks and taxiing. Practically that means redundant feeders where possible, generator capacity sized for critical loads not just terminal comfort loads, and UPS or battery energy storage sized to bridge the few seconds that generators need to synchronise and take load. It also means written fuel supply agreements that guarantee delivery during disruptions, routine full-load testing of backup systems, and integrated contingency drills that include airlines, ground handlers, ANSPs, fuel suppliers, and local grid operators. ICAO guidance supports automatic and very short switch-over arrangements for lights and instrument systems; operators should adopt those as minimums and build upward from there.
There is also a regulatory lever available. The EU Directive on the Resilience of Critical Entities imposes requirements on entities that provide essential services to perform risk assessments, adopt resilience measures, and report disruptive incidents. Airports, and the operators who run ground and navigation services, should be front and centre in national resilience plans. That legal framework is an opportunity: designate key airports and ANSP sites as critical entities, force multi-stakeholder contingency planning, and tie concession contracts and supplier agreements to measurable resilience outcomes. Regulators should require periodic joint exercises and audit backup power arrangements and fuel logistics.
Beyond contingencies on site, airports should accelerate investments that reduce single points of failure. Short term measures that deliver outsized operational benefit include distributed battery systems for immediate ride-through, on-site low-emission gensets dedicated to airfield lighting and ATC equipment, and modular microgrid controllers that allow safe islanding. Medium term actions include negotiating priority grid feeds, working with TSOs on independent feeder routes, and advocating for faster interconnectors and strategically sited storage that also benefit the surrounding communities. The public sector should prioritise these projects because airport disruptions cascade into national mobility and economic loss.
I fly into and out of busy airports. I have sat in a darkened cockpit waiting for a decision that hinged on a generator coming online and I have seen controllers manage with abbreviated tools because of degraded power. The technical rules are clear. The gap I see is in execution and joint practice. If airports, ANSPs, TSOs, and regulators treat resilience as a shared operational problem and fund the practical fixes now, we reduce the risk that a localized grid event becomes a full aviation system emergency. Do the drills, harden the critical loads, secure fuel and communications, and use the EU resilience framework to hold actors to account. That will keep the lights on where it matters most.