Power restored after massive blackout hits Spain, Portugal, France
Madrid: Electricity has returned to parts of northern, southern and western Spain, the grid operator said on Monday, as a blackout sparked chaos for millions across the Iberian peninsula.
"Tension has now been restored in substations in several areas of the north, south and west of the peninsula, beginning to give supply to consumers in these areas," Red Electrica said in a statement.
Earlier, electricity was cut off across Spain and Portugal and part of southern France on Monday in a massive blackout that impacted millions of people, grid operators said.
The cause for the outage was not immediately identified. It will take "six to 10 hours" to restore power in Spain, the state grid operator said.
"We are looking at between six and 10 hours, if all goes well," Eduardo Prieto, head of Red Electrica, told Cadena Sur radio, adding that several parts of the network "are already repaired" and saying it was impossible "to speculate on the cause for the moment".
Spain's state electricity network operator Red Electrica said on X said it had managed to restore power in the north and south of the country. Portugal's REN operator said all the Iberian peninsula was affected, as well as part of France.
Power was restored in southwestern France after a blackout on Monday that also hit Spain and Portugal, French high-voltage grid operator RTE said, adding it remained unclear what caused the outage.
"An electrical incident is currently affecting Spain and Portugal, the cause of which remains to be determined," RTE said, describing the blackout as a "major outage" in the Iberian peninsula.
"In France, homes were without power for several minutes in the Basque Country. All power has since been restored," it said, referring to the region in France's extreme southwestern corner on the border with Spain.
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The sudden drop in grid load destabilized electricity flows, which require an extremely stable frequency of 50 Hertz to maintain supply. This, in turn caused a break in the Spanish and French electricity interconnection that goes through the Pyrenees mountains, resulting in the total collapse of the Spanish power system. Spain exports electricity to Portugal, so the collapse of power in Spain quickly spread throughout the Iberian Peninsula. Some areas in France also suffered brief outages on Monday. WHO DONE IT? The cause of the initial drop that led to the catastrophic cascade of events is unclear, though a collapse in Spain's solar power system was certainly involved. Data from Spanish grid operator Red Electrica shows that on Monday solar generation dropped at 12:30 p.m. from around 18 GW to just under 5 GW by 1.35 p.m., so this accounted for the vast majority of the overall drop. But it remains unknown why this occurred or why it caused the entire system to collapse so rapidly. One possible contributor is the lack of so-called 'grid inertia' as a result of the relatively small share of nuclear and fossil fuel generation in Spain's power mix. Inertia is the kinetic energy created by the rotation of spinning generators. In the case of a sudden loss of power, this provides a temporary supply of energy that can help maintain grid frequency, thus acting as a shock absorber. Inverter-based wind and solar power, which generated just under 70% of Spain's total electricity at the critical moment on Monday, does not involve physical rotation and therefore inertia could not compensate for the sudden loss of power. An obvious short-term solution to avoid a repeat of the blackout would be to maintain a higher baseload of rotating power generation. Over the long term, however, power systems will need to invest heavily in battery capacity to store electricity as well as technologies for synchronising the grid that are critical to maintaining the 50 Hz frequency. In theory, this should be doable, as battery costs have declined sharply in recent years and are being deployed at scale around the world. But all this would still require heavy investments. While spending on new solar capacity reached around $500 billion last year, investment in grids was only at around $400 billion, becoming bottlenecks for the energy transition, according to the International Energy Agency. WAKE-UP CALL While this outage might be unprecedented on the continent, European governments cannot say there were no warning signs. One growing source of concern related to the management of renewables has been the increase in so-called 'dunkelflaute' events across northwest Europe this winter. This refers to extended periods in which levels of both wind and sun decline significantly, limiting the power that can be generated by either. Up until now, such declines have typically been offset by natural gas power plants. 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