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Spain’s electricity grid operator ruled out a cyber attack as the cause of this week’s massive power outage as authorities rushed to get transport networks and infrastructure running again.
Widespread disruption continued in Madrid, Barcelona and other cities on Tuesday morning after the blackout paralysed transport and communications across much of Spain and Portugal, even as both countries said they had fully restored power supplies.
Eduardo Prieto, operations director for Red Eléctrica, said the grid company, after consultations with Spain’s intelligence services, had found no evidence of a cyber attack designed to bring down the network.
“We have been able to conclude there was no intrusion in our electricity grid control system that could have caused the incident,” Prieto said, stressing that the findings were preliminary.
He also appeared to rule out any weather phenomenon as the cause.
Prieto said the grid operator has still not identified the cause of the outage but said it was “very possible” it was linked to a disruption in solar power supply, according to local media reports.
The network responded “satisfactorily” to a sudden loss of generation in south-west Spain at 12.32pm on Monday, he said, but seconds later there was another massive loss of supply that collapsed the whole system in Spain and Portugal.
A spokesperson for the European Commission said the outage was of a “unprecedented magnitude, so obviously we will be looking into the lessons learnt”.
RE said almost 100 per cent of energy supply had been restored in Spain by 7am on Tuesday and the system was now working normally.
The Portuguese government said power had been fully restored across the country and that Lisbon’s metro, which had been suspended, would restart services on Tuesday.
King Felipe chaired a meeting of Spain’s security council on Tuesday morning as authorities tried to restore some normality after declaring a state of emergency on Monday.
Thousands of stranded travellers were forced to spend the night in railway stations around the country while passengers were left stranded on a dozen trains until late into the night.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said in a television address late on Monday that all “potential causes” were being analysed.
Spain’s electricity system collapsed at 12.33pm on Monday when 15GW of power supply — equivalent to 60 per cent of nationwide demand — was lost in only five seconds, Sánchez explained.
“This has never happened before,” Sánchez said.
With such a serious imbalance between supply and demand, the grid shut down and interconnections with France and Morocco were lost. Only when these cross-border links were established could supply be gradually restored, enabling power to be returned to the grid.
Spain’s centre-right opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo criticised Sánchez for a lack of communication over the crisis, saying the government was “still overwhelmed”.
“We’ve had an electrical blackout, we’ve had a telecoms blackout and now we have an information blackout. It’s difficult to explain this, it’s clearly intolerable,” Feijóo told Esradio.
Feijóo also attacked the government’s plan to phase out nuclear power from 2027, arguing it would leave the grid more vulnerable to fluctuations in renewable power generation.
Spain’s national rail operator Renfe said on Tuesday that some services would operate normally, including trains between Madrid and Barcelona.
Some suburban trains around Madrid were resuming and most metro services restarted at 8am local time. However, commuter trains around Barcelona were completely suspended because of the erratic power supply and there were no trains at all in Galicia, in the north-west of the country.
Aena, Spain’s biggest airport operator, warned of continued disruption but flight cancellations at Madrid and Barcelona were down sharply from Monday.
Lisbon airport continued to face disruption on Tuesday morning, with average delays for arriving flights of more than one hour, according to flight tracking service Flightradar24.
Spain is one of the countries at the forefront of efforts to rely more on renewable electricity as part of the shift away from fossil fuels, but Monday’s crisis is likely to fuel concerns about power networks’ ability to cope with demand and the increased volatility of supply from renewables.
Spain generates about 43 per cent of its power from wind and solar but grid and storage capacity has not kept pace with the rapid development of renewable energy.
Additional reporting by Philip Georgiadis in London and Alice Hancock in Brussels
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