Authorities in Spain and Portugal have promised to investigate what caused a massive blackout across Spain, Portugal and parts of France on Monday, in what was one of Europe’s biggest ever grid failures.
While power has been restored to tens of millions of people, disruptions to transport services were expected to persist for days to come.
Reuters says both countries remain under states of emergency due to the widespread outages, with experts saying it could take weeks to determine the cause.
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According to Spain’s grid operator Red Electrica, the blackout began at 12:30pm on Monday, with a sharp fluctuation in the Spanish electricity grid that caused the entire electricity system to disconnect from the rest of the European system.
In a matter of five seconds, 15GW of power was suddenly lost from the grid, leading to abnormal oscillations in the high-voltage lines and synchronisation failures across the interconnected power grid into France.
“To give you an idea, 15GW is equivalent to approximately 60% of the country’s demand at that time,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said.
Portugal’s Prime Minister Luis Montenegro has blamed its neighbour for the outage, saying it “did not originate in Portugal” and that “everything indicates” the problem started in Spain.
Rystad Energy senior analyst Pratheeksha Ramdas said, “The partial restoration of power across Iberia has brought to light a deeper vulnerability in the region’s energy system.
A critical blackout lasting a few hours highlighted the heavy dependence on cross-border electricity flows.
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“Spain’s high renewable penetration exposed difficulties in balancing intermittent supply, while Portugal’s complete reliance on imports underscored its lack of flexibility and energy storage. Although France managed the situation better, it still faced difficulties in managing unexpected electricity flows.
“This disruption serves as a clear warning: without stronger domestic resilience and improved regional coordination, future grid failures could have even more severe consequences.”
Authorities have vowed to investigate how the incident occurred to prevent similar events taking place in the future.
