'I Don't Like Mondays': Unprecedented blackout paralyses daily life in Spain, Portugal for 8 hours

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00:00Next, Spain, beginning the investigation to the causes of the blackout

00:04that disrupted millions of lives across the Iberian Peninsula.

00:07A court is examining potential sabotage of critical infrastructure.

00:11Meanwhile, a tragedy has emerged.

00:13Amid the blackout, three elderly people died from suspected carbon monoxide poisoning

00:18after using a generator to power an oxygen machine.

00:21As authorities in Spain and Portugal work to get the whole of the Iberian Peninsula

00:30reconnected to the power grid, questions are being asked

00:33what caused the two countries to suddenly go offline.

00:36A massive outage hit at around lunchtime on Monday,

00:40plunging businesses and transport networks into chaos.

00:44En lo que respecta a las causas, about the cause,

00:48what the red electric technicians are telling us

00:50is that at 12.33 this afternoon,

00:5415 gigawatts of generation were suddenly lost from the system

00:57and that they were lost in just five seconds.

01:01This is something that has never happened before.

01:07It is still not known what caused the sudden drop in power supply,

01:11which was equal to about 60% of Spain's needs at the time.

01:15Authorities in Portugal blamed it on a rare atmospheric phenomenon,

01:18while some in Spain speculated on a rapid rise in temperature of five degrees

01:23shortly before the outage.

01:25Spain's electrical provider, Red Electrica, said a very strong oscillation in the network

01:30had cut off Spain's grid from the rest of continental Europe,

01:33leading to the system's collapse.

01:35Getting both countries back online was a gradual process because of the risk of overloading the network yet again.

01:42Spain was able to call on France and Morocco to supply emergency power to reboot its own networks,

01:47but Portugal was forced to do so on its own.

01:50The episode underlines deficiencies in Spain's power grid,

01:54which is relatively isolated from the rest of Europe,

01:57and the country's shift to renewable energy sources,

02:00which now supply 56% of its electricity,

02:03has not been fully matched by upgrades to system management.

02:06Let's get the analysis of bringing in Sophie Urabassianu,

02:11who is an energy and base oil expert at the ICIS in London.

02:15Sophie, thanks for being with us.

02:17I'd be interested in hearing from you what your theory is about this outage.

02:21Do you have any insight you can share with us here at France 24?

02:26Well, I can't speculate on the causes because no official cause has been set yet.

02:31There's still an investigation that's going on.

02:33But what I can say is that it has been a colossal blackout.

02:37It plunged Spain into darkness,

02:39and the impact was strongest in transport, in health, in communications,

02:43but also in the chemicals and energy sectors.

02:46And obviously, we've had a similar situation in Portugal,

02:49and that's because those two systems were synchronized.

02:52In a way, those electricity interconnectors do not stop at the national borderlines.

02:57We had power flows with France reversing to support that Spanish grid.

03:00And I guess one of the strongest impacts was the fact that we've had various refineries

03:07that had to be shut down as an emergency protocol kicked in.

03:11This is quite an amazing story, isn't it, in many ways, Sophie?

03:15And people are wondering whether, you know, if it's Spain, Portugal today,

03:19well, who might it be tomorrow?

03:21Is there a possibility that a similar issue could affect other countries across Europe

03:26at any particular time?

03:27Again, it depends on the cause.

03:31Now, obviously, I have seen statements from the head of Spain who said, you know,

03:37there's still an investigation happening.

03:40Now, a theory has been discounted.

03:43So it could have been a cyber attack.

03:44It could have been a combination of factors.

03:47What is clear is the fact that there is that vulnerability in the transmission grids,

03:54especially when there is a lot of renewable generation there.

03:59Yesterday evening, the systems were able to be brought back online due to the gas fire generation.

04:06So a lot of that was used.

04:08In fact, for today, the forecast showed that the demand for gas for power plants was going

04:15to be more than double what it normally is in order to bring that system back to a regular level.

04:24And it just shows that how dependent our society has become on electricity.

04:30You know, the impact is going to take a few days.

04:32There are some plants out there, some units that were shut down in an emergency stage.

04:36And it's going to take a few days to get them back and get all that capacity back up to full.

04:44Once upon a time, Sophie, we did things in a manual way.

04:48We looked things up.

04:49We sifted through, I don't know, a pamphlet or a book to find out a fact or find out the time of a train, for instance.

04:55But now, of course, we do it all electronically.

04:58And those kind of things, of course, all crashing as a consequence or a knock-on effect of what we're talking about.

05:04You mentioned about renewables, regenerated energy.

05:08Am I hearing that the green factor could be a problem?

05:14Not necessarily a problem.

05:16But obviously, we are dependent on electricity to be produced when the sun is shining or when the wind is blowing.

05:24So obviously, if you have a large part of the energy mist, like basically that's what we have in Spain right now,

05:31then this does expose the grid to the issues, right?

05:38If you need to have a stream of baseload, electricity produced, that needs to come from a nuclear power plant or from a gas fire power plant.

05:47And in the Iberic Peninsula, a lot of that is renewable.

05:52Obviously, there is a sustainable aspect of it.

05:55It is cleaner.

05:56It is greener.

05:57So there is a good part of it.

05:59But obviously, this sort of also kind of sheds light on the fact that we do need to have some reserves in there.

06:06We do need to have that baseload capacity available for when issues like this happen in the future.

06:12Should the structure of the network be changed, Sophie?

06:17Obviously, it is a strong point that we can all supply energy from country to country.

06:23But it seems here that that might have been a bit of a problem that things didn't stop at borders in some way, shape or form.

06:29I don't mean to sound sort of retrograde in saying this, but, you know,

06:32would it be more sensible to break down this kind of big pan-European structure and maybe be more national?

06:37The issues with that is that that would increase the cost of electricity,

06:44because what we have at the moment with such an, let's say, an integrated transmission grid throughout most European countries,

06:51it means that electricity can be exchanged.

06:54And in a way, it sort of helps to reduce price volatility on the wholesale market,

06:58which ultimately reduces that end consumer price.

07:01So if we were to remove, or let's say, this interconnectivity, we put barriers in,

07:08then overall, that would probably, I would say, that would even make the situation worse,

07:12because if there is a price volatility that's exposed in Greece, you know, there is no way to kind of temper that.

07:21There is no way to kind of bring electricity from other countries like Italy.

07:24I can hear what you're saying.

07:25And, of course, there was a thanks to Morocco, wasn't there, from the Spanish prime minister,

07:30for Morocco's help in getting Spain back up.

07:34Yes, it's true.

07:35I mean, we did have the French CSO also coming in,

07:39and basically they were supporting the Spanish CSO in bringing back everything.

07:44Now, normally, what's interesting is the fact that Spain is a net exporter,

07:50which is really interesting.

07:51In this case, obviously, it had to reverse the flows.

07:55It's quite interlinked with Portugal, as I mentioned.

07:59And if you look at Europe, the electricity markets, the gas markets, they're interconnected.

08:05That's why, you know, we have reactions in terms of price.

08:09We have reactions in terms of capacity everywhere.

08:12In a way, France was there to kind of, you know, pick things up,

08:16and they do benefit of a lot of nuclear capacity there as well.

08:19So that's baseload capacity.

08:20Sophie, thank you very much indeed for giving us a breakdown of a number of things.

08:26Of course, it's all subject to basically what happens next, isn't it, in terms of the inquiry.

08:30But at least you've been through a number of possible scenarios for us

08:34and given us some real insight.

08:35Sophie Udu-Bassianu, energy and base oil market expert at ICIS in London.

08:43Thank you, Sophie, for joining us here on France 24.

08:45We appreciate your time.

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