News April 29, 2025 0 Comments

Spain’s Power Outage Caused Chaos For Millions Of People Across The Iberian Peninsula

Spanish authorities say power has been partially restored in northern, southern and western Spain following a massive power outage that has caused chaos for millions of people across the Iberian Peninsula. While the government has promised an investigation into the outages, which also affected parts of France and Portugal, the National Energy Network has suggested that they could have been caused by extreme temperature variations in the interior of the country.

The outage was as sudden as it was inexplicable. Across Spain and parts of Portugal and France, the electricity which keeps a modern economy humming simply disappeared. Traffic lights were out, meaning streets were soon gridlocked. In Madrid, the metro system shut down, funnelling more people onto busy streets and into cars that then clogged arteries.

Outside Atocha, Madrid’s rail hub, thousands found themselves stranded with little idea of how to get home or get to work. Inside, the normally bustling platforms were eerily deserted. Airports fell back on emergency power supplies, but scores of flights were still grounded. That was expected to have a knock-on effect across Europe. The outage occurred around 11.30 this morning, Irish time.

Play at the Calle Magica on the seventh day of the Madrid Masters tennis tournament was suspended, with fans using their mobile phones to find their way out of the stadium. Bank machines, office computers, restaurant ovens were all affected, an expanding glitch that rippled through every aspect of life. I’m in a data centre and everything has gone off.

All the alarms popped up and now we are waiting with the groups, waiting to find out what happened. The groups can’t go down. If the groups go down, all communication goes down and it’s a huge problem. The government said it was trying to restore power and find out the cause of the outage as quickly as possible. This afternoon, the authority said it could take several hours.

As people stocked up on food in those supermarkets which still had power, the Spanish grid operator Red Electrica said it was working with energy companies to restore power in phases. And Tony joins us now from Brussels. Tony, Portugal, of course, one of the countries also impacted by this. Its prime minister, as well as the EU, saying that there’s no indication of a cyber attack.

Is it still a consideration, though? Well, yeah, the Portuguese Prime Minister, Luis Montenegro, they’re saying that he couldn’t rule that out. Now, Pedro Sanchez, the Spanish Prime Minister, a short time ago said that there was no conclusive evidence one way or another what had caused this outage.

But the National Energy Agency has talked about extremely high temperatures between 12 and one o’clock Spanish time today. And if you have very high temperatures, that limits the amount of power that can be carried on those high voltage cables.

Government Has Promised An Investigation Into The Outages

And there is some suggestion that the cables that link Spain to the European grid over the Pyrenees, that may have been shut off for a period. And that’s why the outage may have been so catastrophic. Now, obviously, we are looking at potentially another major weather phenomenon and linked to this problem.

Huge problems in Valencia last year with the flooding. That was as a result of very high temperatures over the Mediterranean colliding with an Arctic polar front over Spain, causing that torrential rain and over 200 deaths. So I think that’s going to be one of the areas the authorities are going to be looking at.

Spain has been increasing its renewables to about 56% of its overall energy mix, which is a huge increase in recent years. Nuclear has been declining. Fossil fuels have been down, but clearly Spain has an overall profile problem with these very high temperatures and extreme weather events. You’re better.

Tony Connolly, thank you for that. Returning now to that massive power cut in large parts of Spain and Portugal. And we’re joined now by Dr. Paul Cuff, who’s an assistant professor in electrical engineering at UCD. Thank you so much for coming in to speak to us on 6.1. Perhaps you can tell us what is behind this, because what it’s been called is a rare atmospheric phenomenon or induced atmospheric vibrations.

What does that mean? Well, I can’t tell you exactly what caused this blackout. No one can. It’s too early. I’d like to contextualise it with a few things. So Spain and Portugal, they’re synchronised together. There’s lots of power lines that cross their border. So they’re what we call one synchronous system. And when you have a problem in your power grid, it affects that entire synchronous system.

Electricity doesn’t respect national borders. But you have this oddity that you have different national operators. So on the Spanish side and the Portuguese side, you have different network operators. So an incident like this happens, it’s massive, it’s so disruptive, all the real power engineers are too busy trying to fix it and restore it.

Spain Power Outage Update

Almost certainly when there is a postmortem, and we do know what caused it, it’s likely to be a number of factors. They probably got very unlucky in some ways. So just the Portuguese side has sort of thrown one factor into play. I’m sure there’s something to that, but I wouldn’t say that’s going to be the whole story.

It’s a bit early for that, I think. So they’re talking about high temperatures in the interior of Spain and perhaps that having an impact on it. Has a cyber attack been ruled out or is it still a possibility? Well, it absolutely is a possibility, I’m afraid. No reason to jump to that conclusion. But that fear is there.

To put the context on that, power grids do have a certain fragility or brittleness to them that The real problem is that if you have one component in your power grid fails, that could be a wind turbine, it could be a transformer, a power line, that could have an immediate effect on the other side of your country.

Everything affects everything else. So there’s a brittleness. So power grid operators are very conservative in how they operate their power grids. They always make sure that whatever they’re doing, they’ve built in a safety margin. So they anticipate the loss of a particular power line, possibly due to these weird atmospheric conditions. They should be able to take those things on the chin. So there’s a brittleness.

Usually we can manage that risk. But it is worrying to think that if someone was to make a cyber attack, they are attacking a system that has certain vulnerabilities. So you can never rule it out, unfortunately. It’s causing chaos across the Iberian Peninsula. We’re thinking of people perhaps who are on their holidays, but there’s people who live there, there’s elderly people, children, people who can’t get up lifts because there’s no electricity, no air conditioning.

How long would it take to fix? Because we’re hearing Spain saying it could be up to 10 hours, Portugal saying it could be up to a week. So, I mean, both of those sound like reasonable predictions. I wouldn’t gainsay either. And this is the nightmare scenario for grid operators.

The entire electricity industry, if you like, is organized around this fear because there is a certain vulnerability to power grids. Everything they do is guided by managing that. So what they’re going to be enacting today is what are called black star capabilities. It’s when you’ve lost your whole grid or a huge chunk of your grid. How do I start bringing my power stations back online to produce electricity?

This is like pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. A large power station needs electricity to turn on, so where do you get that electricity? So they’ll have dug out these plans that are formulated and carefully vetted and run over and rehearsed to say, first you do this step, then the next step, then the next step.

Like a ferociously complicated piece of IKEA furniture, they’re trying to reassemble their power grid. But they have been practicing for this for many is the long year, and that’s what they’re putting into play. How long it takes, I don’t know, but it’s a long, difficult process for sure.