As life returns to normal for most in Spain and Portugal after a massive power blackout across the two nations caused chaos, the governments are still trying to find the reason behind the outage.
The cause of one of Europe’s biggest ever power system collapses remains unclear with Portuguese pointing fingers at neighbouring Spain as the source of the issue.
Red Electrica pointed to a “strong oscillation in the power flow which triggered “a very significant loss of generation”.
Aurora Energy analysts said the frequency of the grid dropped from the nominal 50Hz to 49.85Hz, triggering automatic emergency protocols.
“The frequency decline likely began due to severe oscillations in high-voltage lines in southern France or inland Spain. Hypotheses include a physical fault (line disconnection), a sudden loss of generation within Spain or an atmospheric phenomenon,” they said.
This loss of generation went beyond what the electrical systems are designed to handle and the Spanish grid was disconnected from the European system.
The electric grid suffered two “disconnection events”, causing instability in the system. The system recovered from the first event, but the second caused a widespread blackout, said the REE.
The most common cause of an unplanned power cut which disables electricity on a large scale is extreme weather such as storms, lightning strikes or high winds. The weather at the time of Monday’s collapse was fair.
Power outages can also happen when there are faults at power stations, power distribution lines, substations or other parts of the system.
Another source with direct knowledge of the sector said that leading up to the outage the Spanish grid was running with very little “inertia”, which is energy stored in a large rotating mass like a generator or in some industrial motors that acts as a buffer as it can quickly be used to compensate for sudden changes in demand or supply.
“In those conditions (when there is little inertia) if there’s a drop in production for whatever reason, the grid loses (more) inertia and everything fails. And in a blackout, you need to rebuild inertia before bringing things back online, which takes a few hours,” the source said, requesting anonymity.
Shweta Sharma30 April 2025 04:56
The Madrid Open tennis tournament resumed after the unexplained blackout caused 22 matches to be postponed on Monday.
A packed schedule on Tuesday included second-ranked Iga Swiatek advancing to the quarter-finals.
There was no power at the Caja Magica tennis complex that is hosting the Madrid Open until Tuesday.
(Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)
Jacob Fearnley, a qualifier at the Madrid Open, had been mounting a last stand against Grigor Dimitrov when the lights went off mid-play. Both players were sent off court after the lights went dark.
Spectators were asked to leave the sports complex and the organisers said games were called off “to guarantee the safety of the players, fans and personnel”.
Many players said they used the time to reflect and relax as the batteries of their phones died.
World No 6 Jack Draper said he was “actually enjoying” the time to “focus on what is important.”
“I’m a bit of a minimalist,” he said. “Everyone was panicking, but it was so nice to actually have no phone and none of the other (stuff) going on in the world, and just try and focus on what is important. I ended up reading 10 pages of a book. Usually I don’t read at all, so it was interesting.”
(Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)
Shweta Sharma30 April 2025 04:21
Alex Lopez was one of dozens of people waiting in a long line at the ATM inside Hospital Clínic, a medical centres in Barcelona.
“Hospitals are one of the few places where the power grid is still working, and we want to get cash just in case,” Mr Lopez said. “I had a doctor’s appointment, so we took advantage of it.”
The lights were still working in the building, with generators keeping the power flowing. People gathered at the doors to use the hospital’s open Wi-Fi network, with chaos unfolding outside after the power went out around midday. The metro stopped running, 600 people had to be rescued from lifts across the region of Catalonia and traffic lights stopped working. Cars were also unable to fill up with petrol, with pumps down or payments not being able to go through.
Alex Croft30 April 2025 04:00
Downing Street has dismissed suggestions that a reliance on renewable power was behind outages in Spain and Portugal, after Kemi Badenoch said it was likely to be the cause.
A No 10 spokesperson rejected “unfounded claims, and speculation” after the Conservative Party leader said the UK’s net zero plans could lead to domestic blackouts.
Mrs Badenoch said she had heard “different theories” about what happened in Spain and Portugal.
“Some have said that it’s cyber terrorism, but the more likely issue is the grid – that when you have an electricity supply that’s reliant on renewables, you need a lot of battery storage.
“And quite often, what we’re seeing is renewables running ahead of the storage facilities, which means that when you have surges one way or another, you end up with blackouts.
“And this is one of the reasons why I’ve been saying that the net zero plans we have are not thought through.
“That we’re rushing ahead without having the right infrastructure in place and actually doing things that could end up bankrupting the country or creating blackouts.”
She scrapped her party’s commitment to net zero by 2050 in a U-turn last month, saying it would be impossible to reach.
A No 10 spokesman said it is too early to confirm the cause of the incident and defended the government’s energy transition plans.
“In terms of the claims of reliance on net zero energy leaving countries affected vulnerable to power cuts, these are unfounded claims, and speculation at this stage,” he said.
(AFP/Getty)
Switching to clean energy offers security and a supply of electricity that fossil fuels cannot provide, he added.
“We’ve empowered the national energy system operator to carry out resilience functions across electricity and gas systems, and we’ll continue to work with industry and regulators to improve and maintain the resilience of old, new and future energy infrastructure,” he said.
Energy secretary Ed Miliband warned earlier not to “jump to conclusions about what happened” and said he had been in touch with the UK’s National Energy System Operator (Neso) after the outages in Spain and Portugal.
Shweta Sharma30 April 2025 03:54
Sanchez says Spain will not allow blackout again and vows accountability for private companies
Alex Croft30 April 2025 03:00
Portugal has requested that an EU agency independently audit the power outage which hit the Iberian peninsula the day before;
Acting prime minister Luis Montenegro said his government has asked for the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators to perform an independent audit of the outage.
“We want a full investigation of the outage’s causes. We need quick, urgent answers,” Montenegro told a news briefing.
Alex Croft30 April 2025 02:00
Telephone and internet services have been restored to remote communities in Greenland after the were cut off following the Spain blackout.
The remote areas suffered issues after crucial satellite access was cut out in far-away Spain, the Arctic island’s state-owned telecoms group Tusass said on Tuesday.
Tusass said it had lost connection to satellite equipment based in Spain that provides telephone, internet, TV and radio services.
“It’s because of an error some 3,000 km (1,900 miles) away,” a Tusass spokesperson told Reuters, adding that connection had been restored overnight.
In 2023, Tusass selected the Maspalomas ground station in Spain’s Gran Canaria island off the west coast of Africa as the hub for its new satellite network which provides a critical lifeline for some of Greenland’s most isolated communities.
Alex Croft30 April 2025 01:00
The UK has been looking at how to deal with “different kinds of challenges and threats”, the home secretary has said, after the major power outage in Spain and Portugal.
Asked whether the power cut there had triggered a fear that British infrastructure could be affected in the same way, Yvette Cooper told Sky News that the UK has a “continued approach” to “resilience” and “security issues”.
She added: “We’ve been looking, as part of wider security reviews across the country, how we deal with both resilience and also different kinds of challenges and threats.
“Some of which can be the traditional security challenges, some of which can be the kinds of resilience – things that we’re talking about in Spain and Portugal – and we obviously support them and the governments there in the work that they’re doing.”
Alex Croft30 April 2025 00:00
Emergency callouts after power outage in Spain
Alex Croft29 April 2025 23:15
The Independent’s travel correspondent Simon Calder reports:
After the power outage around noon on Monday 28 April hobbled airports, airlines and air-traffic control systems in Spain and Portugal, the final flight cancellation count has just been announced by aviation analysts Cirium.
Passengers travelling to, from and within Spain encountered 413 cancellations, while the score for Portugal is 372. But because many of those are links between the two countries, and are therefore “double counted,” The Independent believes the true total is around 500 – affecting an estimated 80,000 passengers.
The worst affected airport was Lisbon, with 45 per cent of departures grounded. Next was Seville, where one-third of departing flights were cancelled. In absolute terms, though, Madrid and Barcelona were the Spanish cities with the highest number of cancellations – around 50 at each.
Alex Croft29 April 2025 22:29
