Spain and Portugal suffered through an enormous blackout on Monday affecting millions of their countrymen and women with a criss-crossed Iberian Peninsula. This unprecedented blackout originated in southwest Spain, a region known for its solar energy production, leading to widespread disruption in both countries.
Spain’s grid operator—the Red Eléctrica—launched a preliminary investigation into the outage. They determined that the event was unrelated to cybersecurity threats. Eduardo Prieto, the operations executive at Red Eléctrica, explained that two consecutive events occurring at 12:32 pm on Monday indicated a “generation disconnection” that severed the energy supply across the peninsula.
Over in Portugal, government officials were quick to dismiss the possibility of a cyber-attack as the reason behind the blackout. Antonio Leitao Amaro, a spokesperson for the Portuguese government, announced that there were no signs of a cyber-attack. He further testified that there was no indication of any nefarious behavior. The Portuguese electrical grid operator, REN, rejected reports blaming the power failure on unusual atmospheric phenomena. This would be a real and powerful statement! REN’s spokesperson Bruno Silva further verified, “REN confirms we did not issue this statement.”
In fact, Spain’s national meteorological office, Aemet, looked into the situation in depth. In short, they found no evidence that there were any weather-related issues that would have justified such a power cut. Aemet reported, “During the day of 28 April, no unusual meteorological or atmospheric phenomena were detected, and nor were there sudden variations in the temperature in our network of meteorological stations.”
The magnitude of the blackout was staggering, affecting over 60 million people in both countries. Spanish freelancers would be at risk of losses of up to €1.3 billion as a result of the disruption. This incident prompted questions regarding the security of Spain’s energy infrastructure and its resilience to handle such widespread outages.
As recovery efforts quickly advanced, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez declared that Spain was making exponential progress. As of Tuesday morning, Spain had re-established 99.95% of its electricity consumption. Furthermore, he announced that every one of his substations was online again, meaning things were getting back to normal in energy provisioning.
Despite these assurances, some services remained affected. Lisbon Metro still facing widespread outages Tuesday morning after blackout. Commuters were impacted by service delays and disruptions as the weekend was spent working toward a full restoration of service commutation.
Eduardo Prieto voiced the need to know what caused them, as well as the reason for the power outage. He has repeated that cybersecurity threats have been ruled out by preliminary investigations. “We can rule out a cybersecurity incident,” he stated, further clarifying that “there was any kind of intrusion into the Red Eléctrico control system.”
As you can see, Spanish and Portuguese authorities have already begun collaborating to public safety as a priority. Their combined mission is to return to full functionality as soon as possible. By Tuesday morning, power generation in both countries was nearly restored. Immediately, officials started injecting public transparency into the emergency response, scrutinizing what went wrong to trigger such a massive power outage and what can be done to avoid it happening again.