Why Spain was left without electricity for a whole day and what comes next

Monday, 28 April was shocking for residents of the Iberian Peninsula, as well as for the governments of Spain and Portugal. Around noon, the two countries were hit by a massive blackout. Metro and railway services stopped, phone connections were disrupted, traffic lights and ATMs went dark and chaos reigned on roads, at airports and in train stations.

This outage is of the largest in European history. An investigation is expected to determine whether this was caused by external interference, though Spain's grid operator has ruled out a Russian cyberattack. Read more about the incident and its aftermath in the article by Iryna Kutielieva and Sergiy Sydorenko of European Pravda - A blackout without bombs: how and why Spain and Portugal lost power for a day.

The blackout began at 12:32 p.m. CET (11:32 a.m. local time in Portugal). According to energy officials, it took just five seconds for power demand to plummet from 25,184 MW to 12,425 MW.

The power grid disconnected, and high-voltage lines connecting the Iberian Peninsula to France were automatically shut down. The outage affected mainland Spain (excluding the Canary and Balearic Islands) and Portugal (except for Madeira and the Azores), as well as parts of France. Spain's blackout even had an unexpected reach - it disrupted services in Greenland.

The situation in Spain quickly descended into disorder. Remarkably, though, Spanish banks continued operating normally, and some even extended their working hours. In Portugal's capital, Lisbon, resilience was even lower.

Local media reported that the blackout led to the closure of supermarkets and banks, ATMs and electronic payment systems stopped working, and courts shut down. Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro and opposition leader Pedro Nuno Santos had to cancel a debate ahead of the snap elections set for 18 May. Meanwhile, matches at the prestigious Madrid Open tennis tournament had to be cancelled mid-play.

Power was restored by Tuesday. Although the President of the European Council was quick to declare that there were "no signs of a cyberattack," Spanish media raised the possibility of sabotage, perhaps unsurprisingly, given how often the press has reported on malign intentions from Russia. Spain's National Court has officially launched an investigation into the blackout as a possible act of cyber sabotage.

However, energy authorities were quick to push back against that theory. To add to the confusion, Portugal's power grid operator REN claimed on Monday that the outage was caused by a "rare atmospheric phenomenon," though there were no signs of extreme temperature fluctuations at the time. Spain's grid operator Red Electrica has now provisionally concluded that the massive blackout may have been caused by failures in solar energy generation.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has hinted that private energy producers may be to blame, and promised to hold them accountable for the damage caused. The revelation that the 28 April blackout may have stemmed from solar energy problems dealt a serious blow to the Spanish prime minister. The opposition quickly seized the moment to intensify the attack.

Spain's main opposition force, the center-right People's Party, has long championed the need to preserve nuclear power - something the prime minister's party has opposed.

And it's now entirely possible that the investigation into the blackout's cause will reshape Spain's energy policy.

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