Power has been mainly restored to Spain and Portugal after a blackout hit the Iberian Peninsula yesterday. According to Red Eléctrica de España (REE) and Redes Energéticas Nacionais (REN), the event began at approximately 08:43 CET, halting trains and snarling traffic.
Minor outages lasting seconds or minutes occurred in adjacent regions of Andorra and southwestern France. The Iberian Peninsula has a combined population of about 60 million people. Spain’s Canary Islands, Balearic Islands and the territories of Ceuta and Melilla, located across the Mediterranean in Africa, were not affected.
The exact cause is still not known, and T&D World will watch for any official announcements of a more definitive cause. The Portuguese National Cybersecurity Center said there was no indication of cyberattack.
Red Electrica, Spain's grid operator, said today that it had identified two incidents of power generation loss, probably from solar plants, in Spain’s southwest that caused instability in the electric system and led to a breakdown of its interconnection with France, according to a Reuters report.
Spain's Meteorological Agency said in a post on X that no unusual meteorological or atmospheric phenomena were detected in Spain on April 28, nor "were there any sudden temperature fluctuations at our network of weather stations."
Investigators will probably take several months to perform a root-cause analysis and determine the sequence of failures that contributed to the blackout. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said yesterday that, according to the grid operator, it happened when 15 gigawatts of power were suddenly lost in just five seconds. “To give you an idea, 15 gigawatts is equivalent to approximately 60% of the country’s demand at that time,” Sanchez said. “We have never had a complete collapse of the system."
