French anarchists claim responsibility for blackouts which have left 160,000 people in darkness in south of nation overnight
For five hours on Saturday, power was cut across the south of France, leaving vital services like ATMs and traffic lights in a completely unusable state.
A day after the outage, which local officials said was caused by a suspected arson attack on a nearby substation and the vandalism of an electricity pylon, two self-proclaimed 'bands of anarchists' said they were behind the attacks
In an anonymous letter published on Sunday, the groups reportedly wrote: 'The aim of the action was not only to disrupt the festival, but also to deprive all industrial establishments of electricity.
'We're not on a film set, but 'cut!' seemed to sum up our desire to turn off this deadly system', they added.
Damien Savarzeix, the public prosecutor in Grasse, said over the weekend that three of the four pillars of a pylon carrying a power line in Villeneuve-Loubet 'were sawn off' in a 'malicious act'.
Electrical engineers were forced to cut power for the region for several hours, leaving 160,000 without electricity.
A day later, a fire hit a nearby transformer in Nice, knocking out power for 45,000 homes.
Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice, wrote on X: 'I vigorously condemn these criminal acts hitting our country. In the coming days, we are reinforcing the [security camera] network around the city's strategic electric sites.'
Laurent Hottiaux, prefect of Alpes-Maritimes, added that he condemned 'these serious acts of damage' in 'the strongest terms,' the statement said.
Europe's power infrastructure appears to have had its flaws exposed in recent weeks.
Over the weekend, it was suggested that Spanish authorities were experimenting with how far they could push their reliance on renewable energy before the Iberian Peninsula was hit with a massive power outage last month.
As people wait for more answers on what caused the power cut that disrupted tens of millions of lives across Spain and Portugal, several have questioned Spain's heavy reliance on renewable energy sources as it plans to phase out nuclear reactors.
Spain's socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has rejected such criticism, asking for patience while the government investigates the causes of the historic blackout.
Spain's electric grid operator Red Eléctrica de España pinned it on a significant and unprecedented drop in power generation.
Now, it has been suggested that the Spanish government was carrying out an experiment before the country's grid system crashed, The Telegraph reports.
Under said test, authorities had been trialling how far they could push their reliance on renewables as they prepared for Spain's phase-out of nuclear reactors from 2027.
The Spanish Association of Electrical Energy Companies (Aelec), which has criticised the inquiry into the blackout's cause, has now said it was not the country's generators that failed to deliver power to the grid, but rather it was the grid that failed to manage it and then shut down automatically.
The head of Spain's photovoltaic association, Jose Donoso, had made a similar suggestion earlier this month, telling newsoutlet 20Minutos: 'It's a matter of logic; the fact that the entire system goes down because of a photovoltaic plant makes no sense.
'We suffered the consequences of a grid disruption, but we didn't cause it.'
Aelec said the authorities had essentially confined the trial to a 20-second span on April 28, and ignored a series of oscillations in tension that began days earlier and transcended 'emergency' levels across the peninsula for two hours leading up to the blackout.
The association added that the authorities did not substantiate their claim that it all began with a sudden drop of 2.2 gigawatts in power supplied to the grid.
It comes after the sweeping power outage last month raised questions about the electricity grid in a region not normally known for blackouts.
Spain's top criminal court, the Audiencia Nacional, said it was investigating whether the blackout was 'an act of computer sabotage on critical infrastructure' that could be classified as 'a terrorism offence'.
The government set up a commission to investigate what triggered the incident, and refused to rule out any hypothesis.
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