In Spain, power has almost been restored after a failure, the cause of which may be "disappearance" of electricity
Kyiv • UNN
In Spain, 99.16% of the power supply has been restored. The cause of the massive outage may have been the disappearance of 15 gigawatts of electricity from the grid, which is being investigated.
Electricity supply across Spain has been almost fully restored after a massive outage - more than 99%, Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica said on Tuesday morning, UNN reports.
Details
"99.16% of the peninsular demand has already been restored and production is 21,265 MW. All grid substations are operating," the company said.
Work is said to be continuing.
The mass power outage that left the Iberian Peninsula in the dark on Monday appears to have been caused by an unexplained disappearance of 15 gigawatts of electricity from the Spanish power grid, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said, Politico reports.
"This has never happened before," Sanchez said with a serious look at a press conference late Monday. "And experts have not yet determined what caused it, but they will."
He added that "no hypothesis has been ruled out and all possible causes are being investigated."
A Spanish government official said that "at 12:33 (local time), 15 gigawatts of energy produced (in Spain) suddenly disappeared and remained missing for five seconds."
They added that the amount of electricity that suddenly disappeared from the grid was equivalent to 60 percent of the total consumed across the country at the time.
The sudden drop in available power destabilized Spain's power grid, which is closely integrated with Portugal's and connected to the rest of Europe via a small number of cross-border connections with France.
Eduardo Prieto, director of Spanish transmission system operator Red Eléctrica, said on Monday that the outage was caused by a "very strong fluctuation in the electricity grid" that led to "the disconnection of the Spanish power system from the European system and the collapse of the Iberian power grid at 12:38 (local time)."
The situation, which affected public transport networks, traffic lights, hospitals and payment systems, is unprecedented.
As Reuters notes, the cause is unclear, as Portugal has suggested the problem originated in Spain, while Spain has pointed to a break in the connection with France, the publication notes.
Portuguese Prime Minister Luís Montenegro said there was "no indication" that the outage was caused by a cyberattack. Nevertheless, there were rumors of possible sabotage, and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said he had spoken to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.
João Conceição, a board member of Portuguese grid operator REN, told reporters that the company had not ruled out the possibility of "very large electrical voltage fluctuations, initially in the Spanish system, which then spread to the Portuguese system."
"There may be a thousand and one reasons, it is premature to assess the cause," he said, adding that REN is in contact with Spain.
The Joint Cyber Command, which reports to the Defence Staff and oversees cybersecurity, and the Spain's National Cryptological Centre have launched an investigation into the power outage.
Sanchez said that restoring power across the country could take longer than expected.
As Reuters writes, electricity began returning to some areas of the Iberian Peninsula late Monday after a massive outage shut down much of Spain and Portugal, grounding planes, halting public transport and forcing hospitals to suspend routine work.