The electricity was restored in almost all of Spain and Portugal on Tuesday morning after a massive power failure affects the entire Iberian peninsula, but the cause of the power failures remained a mystery.
The widespread failure lasted about eight hours – in some regions longer – and Castle U -Bahn networks, ATMs and traffic lights, while they disrupted flights and mobile communication on Monday.
At 7 a.m. on Tuesday, more than 99 percent of the energy requirement in Spain was restored, said electricity operator Red Electrica in the country. The Portuguese network operator Ren, Ren, said that all of his electricity voltages were online again.
When life normalized again – during reopening of schools and offices, traffic and restarting public transport – the authorities in Spain have to provide further explanations for this, which one of the most serious power failures in Europe ever prompted.
The Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said that his government’s priorities were twice: restoring the electrical system of the country and the search for the causes of blackout, so that a similar event “never takes place again”.
“We analyze all potential causes without rejecting a hypothesis,” said Sanchez.
Such a widespread electrical failure has a precedent on the Iberian Peninsula or in Europe.
People were stranded outside the train stations on Monday, as a comprehensive power failure of public transport, delayed flights and widespread traffic jams.
Eduardo Prieto, Director of Services for System Operations at Spain’s power operator, found two steep, successive “separation events” before the blackout on Monday. At a press conference on Tuesday, he said that further investigations were necessary to understand why they took place.
In a statement on Monday evening, Red Electrica pointed out a “strong vibration in the flow of performance” that “triggered a very significant loss of generation”.
A source with direct knowledge of the sector said that at the time of the failure, the Spanish network ran very little “inertia”, which is the energy that moves in a large, rotating mass like a generator or in some industrial motors.
Inertia helps to stabilize the network by slowing down the frequency change rate when a sudden waste or an increase in demand or generation increases.
“Under these conditions (if there is little inertia), if there is a decline in production for some reason, the network loses (more) inertia and everything fails. And in a power failure you have to rebuild the sluggishness before bringing things back online again,” said the source and requested anonymity.
No unusual weather or a sign of cyber attack
The Spanish meteorological agency Aemet said that on Monday there was no “unusual meteorological or atmospheric phenomena” and no sudden fluctuations in temperature were recorded at its weather stations.
The National Cyber Security Center in Portugal rejected speculation about the foul on Monday and said there was no signs that the failure was due to a cyber attack.
The President of the European Council, Antonio Costa, also said that there are “no signs of cyber attacks”. Teresa Ribera, an Executive Vice President of the European Commission, excluded Sabotage, but emphasized the failure “was one of the most serious episodes that have recently been recorded in Europe”.
While Red Electrica also excluded a cyber attack, the High Court in Spain said an investigation to determine whether a “An act of computer sabotage” could have been committed “against a critical Spanish infrastructure”.
“Electric instability”, which influences the Barcelona U -Bahn
Power was restored in the Caja Mágica tennis complex, and the Madrid Open was resumed on Tuesday with a packed schedule, after a day when 22 games had to be postponed.
At the largest train stations in Spain, crowds of travelers waited on board trains or tickets for trips that were canceled or disturbed on Tuesday morning.
In Madrid’s Atocha Station, hundreds of people near screens stood on updates. Many had spent the night at the train station and wrapped in ceilings that were provided by the Red Cross. Similar scenes played in Barcelonas Sant’s station.
On Tuesday at 11 a.m., the service on Madrid’s U -Bahn system was completely restored. The system worked normally in Barcelona, but the commuter trains were suspended due to “electrical instability”, said the company that leads the service, Rodalies Catalunya said on X.
Rescue workers in Spain said that they had saved around 35,000 passengers along the railways and the underground on Monday, whereby the blackout sports centers, train stations and airports implement them into temporary silence overnight.
In the meantime, thousands of kilometers were removed, remote areas of Greenland due to the power failure on the Iberian peninsula of crucial satellite access – but the Greenland telecommunications company Tusass said on Tuesday that the service was restored overnight.
Tusass said on Monday that it had lost the connection to satellite equipment in Spain that offered telephone, internet, television and radio services.
