Spain-Portugal power outage live: race to find cause of disruption

Times

29-04-2025

Ruben Coiran, 24, was returning home to Barcelona and had spent 11 hours stuck in Atocha rail station after the blackout waiting for news.
'It's tough — putting up with the cold, bearing the hunger, hanging on … We're having a pretty rough time,' he told AFP.
'There were elderly people, children who haven't been able to eat for six, seven hours. They don't have toilets,' added Coiran, who works in IT.
'For the elderly (and) people with babies, it was more difficult for them.'
Emergency services workers carried out 286 rescue operations on Monday to free people trapped inside elevators in the Madrid region during a nationwide blackout, the head of the regional government said.
'What we are now dealing with more frequently are cases of people trapped in lifts. We have received 286 requests' for help, the head of the regional government of Madrid, Isabel Diaz Ayuso, told television station Antena 3.
One man posted a video on social media saying the blackout trapped him in a lift without coverage for about 40 minutes.
'By hitting the door and shouting a neighbour heard me and informed the municipal police' who came half an hour later to free him, he said.
A multi-purpose sports centre in the city of Guadalajara, in Castilla-La Mancha, became an improvised overnight shelter for those who had their journey cut short by the interruption of the railway service.
A Red Cross spokesman said that 466 people from two trains had been given shelter and provided with blankets, food, water and a hygiene kit to make the hours of waiting 'as bearable as possible'.
There were major problems at airports in Portugal yesterday. Overall 185 flights departing Portuguese airports were cancelled and 187 arrivals cancelled.
At Lisbon 45 per cent of departures were cancelled. Some 25 flights between the UK and Portugal were cancelled — and many return flights.
Passengers said they were unable to secure hotels near the airport as they were all fully booked. Operations are also expected to be disrupted today.
In Spain, 205 flights departing the country's airports were cancelled and 208 arrivals cancelled. The worst affected airports were Seville and Almeria.
Some experts suggested that the Portuguese grid operator company — which cited 'anomalous oscillations' in high voltage lines and 'induced atmospheric vibration' — may have been referring to rapid changes in temperature causing pressure waves to travel through the atmosphere.
These could potentially cause high power lines to vibrate, causing damage.
The experts added that 'induced atmospheric vibration' wasn't a standard term for this. The waves that travel through the air are more usually called gravity waves, thermal oscillations or acoustic-gravity waves.
With the cause of the blackout uncertain, experts have been interpreting comments by Portugal's grid operator about the power cut.
Professor Chenghong Gu of the University of Bath, said the reference by the operator to 'anomalous oscillations' in high voltage lines and 'induced atmospheric vibration' could refer to a phenomenon where high temperature, high humidity and other factors lead electric charges in the ambient atmosphere to interact with electric fields caused by the conductors used to transmit power.
'Under certain conditions, this can cause the vibrations of conductors. Then, the vibrations can cause the changes of the physical characteristics of conductors, reflecting in their key parameters, such as their impedance, reactance,' Gu said.
'The stability of power systems is very sensitive to these parameters, and if they keep changing, currents in transmission lines, voltages in different locations, and system frequency would change. In the worst case, system frequency could drop too low, and customers must be cut off to re-balance the supply and demand.'
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Passengers in Spain and Portugal spent a night sleeping on the floors of stations and airport terminals after the power cut severed services.
Madrid's Atocha main station was badly hit with large numbers of people forced to camp out overnight — although services are slowly resuming. The Madrid metro has also reopened.
Spain's transport minister said number of train lines remain closed, mainly commuter routes in places like Bilbao, Cadiz, Seville, Zaragoza, Vigo and San Sebastian.
Commuter services in Madrid and Valencia are returning to normal but with 'reduced services'.
Long-distance trains from Madrid to Barcelona, Valencia, Malaga, Santander, Granada and the Basque Country are 'progressively returning to normal'.
Major airports in Spain, including Madrid, are operating, but there is a huge backlog after yesterday's flight cancellations.
Unlike Heathrow airport — which was forced to close for almost a day last month after an electricity substation fire — the big Spanish airports have back-up generators.
But many travellers were unable to make it to airports yesterday following the power outages as all transport networks were down. Some of those who made it were forced to sleep at the airport.
It is not just Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France which were affected by the blackouts.
The Greenland telecom company Tussass said overnight that it had lost connection to satellite equipment based in Spain that provides vital telephone, internet, TV and radio services for remote communities in the vast Arctic island.
'Right now there is no contact with our equipment in Maspalomas in Spain, which we are deeply dependent on to be able to supply customers in the satellite area,' Tussass said.
It was not immediately clear how many people were affected.
The comparison was as apt as it was obvious. Though two Iberian neighbours had been brought low and plunged back into the Stone Ages for an April afternoon, when it came to understanding the cause of the mass power cut, there was an information blackout.
'It was Putin,' said a mother rushing to collect her child early from school in Madrid. It almost certainly wasn't, but the lack of information fuelled the kind of speculation that Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, said he could live without.
He might also have done without the Portuguese, who were the first to identify what happened — or at least what they thought had happened.
• What caused the power outage in Spain and Portugal?
Spanish electricity grid operator Red Electrica said it was able to supply 99.16 per cent of the country's electricity demand early on Tuesday as the system gradually recovers from a nationwide blackout on Monday.
All the country's substations were operating on Tuesday morning, Red Electrica said in a post on X. 'We keep working on restoring (power),' it added.
A huge power outage hit most of the Iberian Peninsula on Monday morning, bringing both Spain and Portugal to a standstill — grounding planes, halting public transportation and forcing hospitals to restrict routine proceedings.
Power has been restored to Spain and most of Portugal after Monday's widespread outages, but significant disruptions on the Iberian peninsula's transport networks remain.
While commuter services in Madrid and Valencia have returned — albeit with reduced capacity — a number of lines in other cities, including Bilbao, Cadiz, Seville, Zaragoza, Vigo and San Sebastian, remain cancelled until further notice.
Long-distance lines, including services from Madrid to Barcelona, are progressively returning to normal.
But there remains a major backlog at airports with more than 500 flights cancelled across Spain and Portugal. Schools also remain closed across the two countries.