Spain and Portugal recover from massive power outage
Spain and Portugal are recovering from a massive power outage that also hit southern France.
The scale of the outage across several national electricity networks would rule our a cyberattack, although the exact cause is not known.
“A strong technical fluctuation in the European electricity system,” led to the blackout, said Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez this evening. However there was no conclusive information on the cause. “We are not ruling out any hypothesis, but we must focus on what is most important, which is restoring electricity to our homes,” he said.
The outage highlights how dependent modern society is on the electricity network, with the failure triggering a national emergency in Spain.
The outage took out the mobile phone network as fill-in basestations went down and central basestations ran on reserve power from lead acid batteries. Electronic transactions from debit and credit cards could not be processed.
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The transport network was also hit, with traffic lights went out bringing traffic to a standstill in all the major cities, as well as stopping trains mid-journey. Hospitals maintained power via backup generators.
Sanchez warned against speculating about the cause, and said interconnectors with France and Morocco were helping restore power. The Moroccan National Electricity Company (ONEE) connected its grid to Spain via power cables that run across the Strait of Gibraltar.
In Portugal Lisbon airport diverted flights to regional airports. The outage could have been caused by “very large oscillation in the electrical voltages, first in the Spanish system, which then spread to the Portuguese system,” said Joao Conceicao, a board member of Portugal’s power operator Redes Energéticas Nacionais (REN). “If it were up to REN, the country would wake up tomorrow with electricity, but unfortunately it’s not just REN that counts,” he said
However what has caused the oscillation is unknown.
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