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Major power outage in Spain and Portugal
- 3 hours ago (2025-04-29)
- David Flin
Spain and Portugal have been hit by a major power outage, causing chaos in the Iberian peninsula.
WBE 2025
The blackout was caused by a sudden large drop in power supply, which caused the grid interconnection between Spain and France to trip, according to REE, the Spanish grid operator.
REE said that the network lost 15 GW of electricity generation in five seconds at around midday local time, and the power went out at 12.33pm local time. The blackout lasted several hours. As of the time of writing, about 90 per cent of the Spanish network has been restored.
Pedro Sánchez, Prime Minister of Spain, said that the ultimate reasons behind the massive loss of power have not yet been identified by REE and that no hypothesis has been ruled out.
REN of Portugal has said that there had been high, anomalous oscillations in HV lines in the lead-up to the outage, but what caused those oscillations is subject to a lot of speculation and investigation, but as yet the cause is unknown. It has been suggested that high rapid temperature variations in the atmosphere was a proximate cause.