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Europe faces rare grid crisis as Iberian blackout exposes vulnerabilities. (Photo: iStock)
Spain and Portugal experienced an unprecedented and widespread power outage, paralyzing daily life and transport systems. It has been described as one of the most severe blackouts in the past decade. Both governments promptly declared a national state of emergency.
While the exact cause remains unclear, the majority of explanations point to grid instability. The process of restarting the grid is complex, and full power restoration could take up to a week.
Massive power outage in Spain and Portugal
The blackout affected nearly the entire Iberian Peninsula, including major cities like Madrid, Barcelona, and Lisbon, with spillover impacts reaching southwestern France. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez stated that the country lost 15 GW of power—around 60% of national demand—within five seconds.
Although neither Spain nor Portugal has confirmed a definitive cause, both have ruled out cyberattacks.
The chart showed Spain’s power consumption dropping off a cliff at the time of the blackout. (Photo: REE)
Portugal’s grid operator, REN (Redes Energéticas Nacionais), initially attributed the event to extreme temperature variations in central Spain, which allegedly triggered anomalous oscillations—also referred to as “induced atmospheric vibration”—that disrupted the interconnected European power grid. REN later retracted this explanation.
Experts acknowledge that rapid temperature shifts could affect power systems, but such a large-scale failure remains rare. Professor Solomon Brown, an energy systems expert at Sheffield University, explained that “induced atmospheric vibration” could resemble localized electromagnetic field variations, similar in impact to solar activity, potentially causing current imbalances that require external control.
Spain’s grid operator, REE (Red Eléctrica de España), offered a different narrative, pointing to a brief outage in parts of France that may have overloaded the European grid, leading to cascading failures across Spain and southwestern France.
Kristian Ruby, Secretary General of Eurelectric, described the event as a once-in-50 or even 100-year occurrence. He acknowledged the Spain–France connection as a contributing factor, but not the root cause of the blackout.
High share of renewables raises grid reliability concerns
Spain derives 56% of its electricity from renewable sources, primarily wind and solar. This high reliance makes power generation more weather dependent. Combined with limited interconnection capacity with neighboring countries, this reduces flexibility in load balancing and increases the challenge of maintaining grid stability—factors that likely contributed to the blackout.
Restarting the grid following such a large-scale outage involves a complex “black start” process, which requires smaller backup generators to sequentially restart larger power units before reconnecting them to the transmission network under strict dispatch control.
REE estimated that national restoration in Spain might take 6 to 10 hours. However, REN warned that due to system complexity and international electricity flows, full recovery across the region could take up to a week.
Source: Reuters, Bloomberg, Euronews, The Guardian, BBC
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