Spain and Portugal switched their power back on after the worst blackout in their history, though authorities offered little explanation for what had caused it or how they would prevent it from happening again.
Traffic lights were back on, train and metro services slowly returned and schools reopened. Commuters battled with delays to get back to work after an outage that had left people stranded in lifts and cut off from phone contact with their families.
The sudden outage had seen the equivalent of 60 per cent of demand in Spain drop in five seconds around midday on Monday.
Spanish Grid operator REE yesterday ruled out a cyber attack as the cause. It said it had identified two incidents of power generation loss, probably from solar plants, in Spain’s southwest that caused instability in the electric system and led to a breakdown of its interconnection with France.
But it was still too early to explain why that had happened, REE’s system operations chief Eduardo Prieto told a Press conference.
“Until we receive the data on the generation aspects we cannot draw conclusions,” he said. REE planned to invest in more interconnections with France to make the system more stable, he added.
Spain is one of Europe’s biggest producers of renewable energy, and the blackout sparked debate about whether the volatility of supply from solar or wind made its power systems more vulnerable.
Investment bank RBC said the economic cost of the blackout could range between $2.5 billion euros and $5bn euros, blaming the Spanish government for being too complacent about infrastructure in a system dependent on solar power with little battery storage.
Madrid’s authorities put on free buses to get people to work yesterday and the metro and some trains started to operate, although with delays
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