What we know about the Spanish power outage
Spain and Portugal are recovering from the massive power outage on Monday, but the cause remains unclear. Investigations are underway.
Data from Spanish national operator REE showed that capacity fell from 25172MW to around 16212W in seconds at 12.30 in April 28th, even though there was low demand. This fell as low as 10536MW two hours later. By midnight capacity was back up to 21196MW, showing the recovery.
One theory is that the outage came from temperature-induced vibrations in 440kV transmission lines (400kV), causing synchronization failures between Spain and France’s electrical systems. This is a rare event called an Induced atmospheric vibration (IAV). This is a low frequency oscillation up to 10Hz caused by corona discharges on the HV cables, with high humidity and high temperature interacting with rough surfaces on old cables or insulation. In rare cases the oscillations can interact with the grid frequency to cause instabilities. That IAV was the cause was initially attributed to a statement by Portugese operator REN but has since been denied.
A fire in the south-west of France, on the Alaric mountain, which damaged a high-voltage power line between Perpignan and eastern Narbonne, has also been identified as a possible cause, Portugal’s national electric company REN said.
REE has denied it was the result of the challenges of integrating increasing amounts of solar power into the grid. REE chair Beatriz Corredor said it was not correct to link the outage to the high share of renewable energy in the country’s total generation.
Spain’s National Security Council is also investigating whether a cyber attack was involved, although this has been downplayed as a cause.
European governments are following the investigation closely. “We’re constantly looking at our own at our own resilience. When it comes to what’s gone on in Spain and Portugal, we need to have a look at exactly what their investigation finds out, and then see what lessons we can learn from it,” said Steve Reed, environment secretary for the UK government. “But it’s difficult to learn the lessons until they find out what’s caused it.”
SEALSQ in Switzerland has pitched its post quantum secure microcontrollers to securely monitor the grid for critical environmental and operational data such as temperature, voltage, and oscillations.
“IoT sensors are transforming smart grids by enabling real-time monitoring and automated fault detection,” said Carlos Moreira, CEO of SEALSQ. “However, their effectiveness depends on secure data transmission. Our quantum-resistant microcontrollers safeguard these devices, empowering grid operators to detect anomalies like temperature swings or synchronization issues early and act before failures escalate.”
This ensures secure, tamper-proof data collection from IoT sensors monitoring environmental and grid parameters and protects against cyberattacks that could manipulate or disrupt critical grid communications. This can enable rapid, automated responses to anomalies, such as isolating faulty segments to prevent cascading failures but it is unclear how this would have helped tackle the issue of the IAV temperature induced vibrations or avoid the power outage on Monday.
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