Blackout in Spain and Portugal, power restored. Causes still unknown
Rights — di Andrea Barolini
For an entire day, Spain and Portugal were left in the dark due to a widespread blackout. Power was restored overnight.
Blackout in Spain and Portugal, power restored. Causes still unknown
For an entire day, Spain and Portugal were left in the dark due to a widespread blackout. Power was restored overnight.
Spain and Portugal returned almost entirely to normality on the night of Tuesday 29 April, after the widespread blackout that hit the two nations from late morning on Monday.
Power supply almost fully restored in both Spain and Portugal
In Portugal, grid operator Redes energéticas nacionais, Ren, announced that electricity supply had now been "perfectly restored" and that, as a result, transport services had also been fully reinstated. The government in Madrid announced that 99 per cent of citizens had regained access to electricity; Transport Minister Oscar Puente further confirmed that all airports were once again operational and that both rail and metro services had been fully restored.
Spain's power supply is almost fully restored after one of Europe's most severe blackouts. apnews.com/article/spain-…
What draws to a close for citizens of the Iberian Peninsula was an entirely unprecedented day. Similar to the one Italy experienced on 28 September 2003, when in the middle of the night the entire country found itself without power due to an incident that occurred in Canton Ticino, Switzerland.
The Italian precedent of September 2003
As happened in Spain and Portugal, that incident also caused a total paralysis of transport, the switching off of traffic lights on the roads, and many people trapped in lifts, requiring the intervention of firefighters. Moreover, Rome was hosting the first edition of the "notte bianca", attended by 500,000 people, many of whom became stranded on metro lines.
On the Iberian Peninsula too, the night unfolded in much the same way, with torches and candles used to try to bring light to the darkness and a widespread sense of vulnerability. The causes of the incident have not yet been established with certainty, and the authorities in Madrid have explained that no hypothesis is currently being ruled out.
Sánchez: "15 gigawatts suddenly vanished from the system"
"For five seconds, 15 gigawatts brutally disappeared from the system. This is equivalent to around 60 per cent of total demand at that moment," Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez explained in a national address at 11pm on Monday, following an emergency meeting of the National Security Council. "We have not yet been able to determine," he added, "what caused the sudden drop. We are analysing all possible causes."
In the meantime, numerous hypotheses have been put forward in the Spanish media. The possibility of a cyberattack was raised, but the idea was almost entirely dismissed by European Council President António Costa, who had already stated on Monday evening that no information pointing in that direction had been found.
"The path is set, and it leads to renewables"
Some have seized on the occasion to put the energy transition undertaken by Portugal and Spain in the crosshairs, pointing the finger at the intermittency of renewable energy production. An argument amplified, for example, by the British newspaper the Telegraph, but one that was immediately challenged by experts. Giuseppe Onufrio, director of Greenpeace Italia, points out that it should be "remembered that Spain still has five nuclear power plants in operation, which therefore played no role in stabilising the electricity grid. At present it is still not clear what happened, and Prime Minister Sánchez has stated that all hypotheses remain open. The development of storage systems – electrochemical and otherwise – will certainly have a positive effect on grid stability. The path is set, and it leads to renewables. What's more, wind and solar have already returned to the grid — nuclear has not."
Michael Hogan, a consultant for the independent non-governmental organisation Regulatory Assistance Project, had already explained back in 2022 that "none of the recent events that have occurred in markets with high shares of renewables were caused by excessive reliance on such sources. Despite this, the fossil fuel industry tends to seize every opportunity to promote the argument that the growing shift to renewables is undermining security and increasing costs."
The facts will need to be established in due course. And it cannot be ruled out that some infrastructure may not yet be sufficiently adapted to wind and solar production. But what is certain is that, even if that were the case, the solution most certainly does not lie in reverting to coal, oil and gas, but rather in proper management of distribution networks.