Electricity Restored to 90% of Spain and Most of Portugal After Massive Power Outage

By Staff, Agencies

Lights flickered back to life across most of Spain and Portugal on Tuesday after a massive blackout hit the Iberian Peninsula, stranding passengers in trains and elevators while millions lost phone and internet coverage.

Electricity had been restored to nearly 90% of mainland Spain by early on Tuesday, the grid operator REE said. Power was restored overnight to around 6.2m households in Portugal out of 6.5m, according to the national electricity grid operator. Lights also came on again in Madrid and in Portugal’s capital, Lisbon.

Barely a corner of the peninsula, which has a joint population of almost 60 million people, escaped the blackout. But no firm cause for the shutdown has yet emerged.

Portuguese prime minister, Luis Montenegro, said the source of the outage was “probably in Spain”, while Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said that all the potential causes were being analyzed and warned the public not to speculate because of the risk of “misinformation”.

Earlier, the blackout was blamed by Portugal’s grid operator REN on extreme temperature variations, and left the two countries without trains, metros, traffic lights, ATMs, phone connections and internet access.

People were trapped in lifts, stuck on trains, stalled in traffic and abandoned in airports. Hundreds stumbled along pitch-black metro tunnels using their phone torches; others scrambled for basics in supermarkets that could only take cash, or began long trudges home from work.

Mobile networks went down and internet access was cut as power failed at 12.33pm [11.33 BST]. Hospitals postponed routine operations but used generators to attend to critical cases, and while electronic banking was able to function on backup systems, most ATM screens were blank.

By 10pm local time on Monday, 62% of Spain’s substations were back online [421 of 680] and 43.3% of the power demand had been met, while Portugal’s grid operator REN said it had restored power to 85 of the country’s 89 substations.