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The operator of the Spanish electricity network excluded a cyber attack as the cause of this week’s mass outage, while authorities rushed to take transport networks and infrastructure again.
Widespread rift continued in Madrid, Barcelona and other cities on Tuesday morning after paralyzed transport and paralyzed communications in much of Spain and Portugal, though both countries said they had completely restored energy supplies.
Eduardo Prieto, director of Operations for Red Eléctrica, said the network company, after consulting with Spain’s intelligence, had not found any evidence of a cyberattack created to overthrow the network.
“We were able to conclude that there was no interference with our electricity network control system that could cause the incident,” Prieto said, stressing that the findings were preliminary.
He also seemed to exclude any weather phenomenon as a cause.
Prieto said the network operator has not yet identified the cause of the interruption, but said it was “very possible” it was linked to a cessation of solar power supply, according to local media reports.
The network responded “satisfactorily” for a sudden loss of generation in South-West Spain at 12.32 Monday afternoon, he said, but seconds later there was another massive loss of supply that overthrew the entire system in Spain and Portugal.
A European Commission spokesman said the interruption was of “unprecedented size, so we will undoubtedly see the lessons taken”.
Re said that almost 100 percent of the power supply had returned to Spain until 7am on Tuesday and the system was now functioning normally.
The Portuguese government said the government had returned completely throughout the country and that the Metro of Lisbon, which had been suspended, would resume services on Tuesday.
King Felipe chaired a Spanish Security Council meeting Tuesday morning while authorities tried to restore some normal after declaring a state of emergency on Monday.
Thousands of travelers trapped were forced to spend the night at railway stations across the country while passengers remained trapped in a dozen trains until late at night.
Spain Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said in a late television speech on Monday that all the “possible causes” were being analyzed.
Spain’s electricity system collapsed at 12.33 on Monday when 15GW of power supply – equivalent to 60 percent of nationwide demand – was lost in just five seconds, Sánchez explained.
“This has never happened before,” Sánchez said.
With such a serious imbalance between supply and demand, the network closed and links to France and Morocco were lost. Only when these cross -border connections were established can they be supplied gradually, enabling power to return to the network.
Spain’s opposite opposite leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo criticized Sánchez for lack of communication on the crisis, saying the government was “still overloaded”.
“We have had an electrical break, we have had an interruption of telecommunications and now we have an information interruption. It is difficult to explain this, it is clearly intolerable,” Feijóo Esradio told.
Feijóo also attacked the government’s plan to phase nuclear energy from 2027, arguing that it would leave the network most vulnerable to fluctuations in renewable energy generation.
Spanish national railway operator Renfe said on Tuesday that some services would function normally, including trains between Madrid and Barcelona.
Some suburban trains around Madrid were resuming and most of the subway services were resumed at 8am with local time. However, passenger trains around Barcelona were completely suspended due to disorderly power supply and there were no trains in Galicia at the northwest of the country.
Aena, the largest airport operator in Spain, warned of constant breakdown, but flight cancellations in Madrid and Barcelona were significantly reduced by Monday.
Lisbon’s airport continued to face interruptions on Tuesday morning, with average delays to reach flights more than an hour, according to Fliffradar Flight Flight Service.
Spain is one of the places in the vanguard of efforts to rely more on renewable electricity as part of shift away from fossil fuels, but Monday’s crisis is likely to promote concerns about the ability of energy networks to cope with the supply instability and instability from renewable.
Spain generates about 43 percent of its power from the wind and the sun, but the network and storage capacity has not maintained the rhythm with the rapid development of renewable energy.
Additional reporting by Philip Georgiadis in London and Alice Hancock in Brussels
