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'I Don't Like Mondays': Unprecedented blackout paralyses daily life in Spain, Portugal for 8 hours
FRANCE 24 English
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4/30/2025
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00:00
Next, Spain, beginning the investigation to the causes of the blackout
00:04
that disrupted millions of lives across the Iberian Peninsula.
00:07
A court is examining potential sabotage of critical infrastructure.
00:11
Meanwhile, a tragedy has emerged.
00:13
Amid the blackout, three elderly people died from suspected carbon monoxide poisoning
00:18
after using a generator to power an oxygen machine.
00:21
As authorities in Spain and Portugal work to get the whole of the Iberian Peninsula
00:30
reconnected to the power grid, questions are being asked
00:33
what caused the two countries to suddenly go offline.
00:36
A massive outage hit at around lunchtime on Monday,
00:40
plunging businesses and transport networks into chaos.
00:44
En lo que respecta a las causas, about the cause,
00:48
what the red electric technicians are telling us
00:50
is that at 12.33 this afternoon,
00:54
15 gigawatts of generation were suddenly lost from the system
00:57
and that they were lost in just five seconds.
01:01
This is something that has never happened before.
01:07
It is still not known what caused the sudden drop in power supply,
01:11
which was equal to about 60% of Spain's needs at the time.
01:15
Authorities in Portugal blamed it on a rare atmospheric phenomenon,
01:18
while some in Spain speculated on a rapid rise in temperature of five degrees
01:23
shortly before the outage.
01:25
Spain's electrical provider, Red Electrica, said a very strong oscillation in the network
01:30
had cut off Spain's grid from the rest of continental Europe,
01:33
leading to the system's collapse.
01:35
Getting both countries back online was a gradual process because of the risk of overloading the network yet again.
01:42
Spain was able to call on France and Morocco to supply emergency power to reboot its own networks,
01:47
but Portugal was forced to do so on its own.
01:50
The episode underlines deficiencies in Spain's power grid,
01:54
which is relatively isolated from the rest of Europe,
01:57
and the country's shift to renewable energy sources,
02:00
which now supply 56% of its electricity,
02:03
has not been fully matched by upgrades to system management.
02:06
Let's get the analysis of bringing in Sophie Urabassianu,
02:11
who is an energy and base oil expert at the ICIS in London.
02:15
Sophie, thanks for being with us.
02:17
I'd be interested in hearing from you what your theory is about this outage.
02:21
Do you have any insight you can share with us here at France 24?
02:26
Well, I can't speculate on the causes because no official cause has been set yet.
02:31
There's still an investigation that's going on.
02:33
But what I can say is that it has been a colossal blackout.
02:37
It plunged Spain into darkness,
02:39
and the impact was strongest in transport, in health, in communications,
02:43
but also in the chemicals and energy sectors.
02:46
And obviously, we've had a similar situation in Portugal,
02:49
and that's because those two systems were synchronized.
02:52
In a way, those electricity interconnectors do not stop at the national borderlines.
02:57
We had power flows with France reversing to support that Spanish grid.
03:00
And I guess one of the strongest impacts was the fact that we've had various refineries
03:07
that had to be shut down as an emergency protocol kicked in.
03:11
This is quite an amazing story, isn't it, in many ways, Sophie?
03:15
And people are wondering whether, you know, if it's Spain, Portugal today,
03:19
well, who might it be tomorrow?
03:21
Is there a possibility that a similar issue could affect other countries across Europe
03:26
at any particular time?
03:27
Again, it depends on the cause.
03:31
Now, obviously, I have seen statements from the head of Spain who said, you know,
03:37
there's still an investigation happening.
03:40
Now, a theory has been discounted.
03:43
So it could have been a cyber attack.
03:44
It could have been a combination of factors.
03:47
What is clear is the fact that there is that vulnerability in the transmission grids,
03:54
especially when there is a lot of renewable generation there.
03:59
Yesterday evening, the systems were able to be brought back online due to the gas fire generation.
04:06
So a lot of that was used.
04:08
In fact, for today, the forecast showed that the demand for gas for power plants was going
04:15
to be more than double what it normally is in order to bring that system back to a regular level.
04:24
And it just shows that how dependent our society has become on electricity.
04:30
You know, the impact is going to take a few days.
04:32
There are some plants out there, some units that were shut down in an emergency stage.
04:36
And it's going to take a few days to get them back and get all that capacity back up to full.
04:44
Once upon a time, Sophie, we did things in a manual way.
04:48
We looked things up.
04:49
We 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.
04:55
But now, of course, we do it all electronically.
04:58
And those kind of things, of course, all crashing as a consequence or a knock-on effect of what we're talking about.
05:04
You mentioned about renewables, regenerated energy.
05:08
Am I hearing that the green factor could be a problem?
05:14
Not necessarily a problem.
05:16
But obviously, we are dependent on electricity to be produced when the sun is shining or when the wind is blowing.
05:24
So obviously, if you have a large part of the energy mist, like basically that's what we have in Spain right now,
05:31
then this does expose the grid to the issues, right?
05:38
If 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.
05:47
And in the Iberic Peninsula, a lot of that is renewable.
05:52
Obviously, there is a sustainable aspect of it.
05:55
It is cleaner.
05:56
It is greener.
05:57
So there is a good part of it.
05:59
But obviously, this sort of also kind of sheds light on the fact that we do need to have some reserves in there.
06:06
We do need to have that baseload capacity available for when issues like this happen in the future.
06:12
Should the structure of the network be changed, Sophie?
06:17
Obviously, it is a strong point that we can all supply energy from country to country.
06:23
But 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.
06:29
I don't mean to sound sort of retrograde in saying this, but, you know,
06:32
would it be more sensible to break down this kind of big pan-European structure and maybe be more national?
06:37
The issues with that is that that would increase the cost of electricity,
06:44
because what we have at the moment with such an, let's say, an integrated transmission grid throughout most European countries,
06:51
it means that electricity can be exchanged.
06:54
And in a way, it sort of helps to reduce price volatility on the wholesale market,
06:58
which ultimately reduces that end consumer price.
07:01
So if we were to remove, or let's say, this interconnectivity, we put barriers in,
07:08
then overall, that would probably, I would say, that would even make the situation worse,
07:12
because if there is a price volatility that's exposed in Greece, you know, there is no way to kind of temper that.
07:21
There is no way to kind of bring electricity from other countries like Italy.
07:24
I can hear what you're saying.
07:25
And, of course, there was a thanks to Morocco, wasn't there, from the Spanish prime minister,
07:30
for Morocco's help in getting Spain back up.
07:34
Yes, it's true.
07:35
I mean, we did have the French CSO also coming in,
07:39
and basically they were supporting the Spanish CSO in bringing back everything.
07:44
Now, normally, what's interesting is the fact that Spain is a net exporter,
07:50
which is really interesting.
07:51
In this case, obviously, it had to reverse the flows.
07:55
It's quite interlinked with Portugal, as I mentioned.
07:59
And if you look at Europe, the electricity markets, the gas markets, they're interconnected.
08:05
That's why, you know, we have reactions in terms of price.
08:09
We have reactions in terms of capacity everywhere.
08:12
In a way, France was there to kind of, you know, pick things up,
08:16
and they do benefit of a lot of nuclear capacity there as well.
08:19
So that's baseload capacity.
08:20
Sophie, thank you very much indeed for giving us a breakdown of a number of things.
08:26
Of course, it's all subject to basically what happens next, isn't it, in terms of the inquiry.
08:30
But at least you've been through a number of possible scenarios for us
08:34
and given us some real insight.
08:35
Sophie Udu-Bassianu, energy and base oil market expert at ICIS in London.
08:43
Thank you, Sophie, for joining us here on France 24.
08:45
We appreciate your time.
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