Everything That Happened During the Power Outage in Spain
The outage happened in most parts of Spain and Portugal.
- Publish date: since hour
Most of Spain and Portugal were hit by a power outage on Monday, April 28, which halted planes, public transport, hospitals' routine operations, and communication.
Spain's Interior Ministry declared a national emergency and deployed 30,000 police across the country to maintain order. The two countries immediately hosted an emergency cabinet meeting to resolve the issue.
Power Outage Across Spain, Portugal, and France
The outage began around 10:30 GMT, and the Portuguese Prime Minister, Luis Montenegro, said that there was no indication of a cyberattack causing the outage.
The Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, revealed that Spain lost 15GW of electricity generation in five seconds, which is equivalent to 60 percent of the national demand.
The extent of the power loss caused the disconnection of the Spanish and French grids, which led to the collapse of the Spanish electric system.
There was a brief suspension of power in France, and the country's grid operator, RTE, provided supplementary power to some parts of northern Spain after the outage hit.
The Return of Electricity
In Spain, the power returned to the Basque Country and Barcelona early in the afternoon. Power returned to parts of Madrid on Monday night; about 61 percent of electricity had been restored by late Monday, according to the national grid operator.
Power started returning gradually to various municipalities in Portugal on late Monday. According to the grid operator, REN, 85 out of 89 power substations were back online.
The Suspension of Medical, Oil, Retail, and Transport Facilities
Madrid and Catalonia's hospitals suspended all routine medical work except for attending to critical patients.
Several Spanish oil refineries were shut down, and so were some retailers, including grocery chain Lidl and the furniture franchise IKEA.
Trains were cancelled in both countries while traffic lights stopped working across Portugal and in Madrid.
Internet traffic decreased by 90 percent in Portugal and by 80 percent in Spain compared to last week's traffic, based on Cloudflare Radar's data.
Is This the First Massive Power Outage in Europe?
Power outages of this extent are a rare occurrence in Europe. Here are some of the massive power outages that have happened on the continent in the past:
- 2003: A power outage occurred across the Italian peninsula for around 12 hours.
- 2006: An overloaded power network in Germany led to electricity cuts across parts of Europe and as far as Morocco.
Main image source: @exczar.