Spain and Portugal restored power after having undergone the worst power outage in their history, although the authorities are not yet fully explained or offer insurance against future disturbances.
The traffic lights, the metro services and the schools gradually resumed normal operations on Tuesday, while the commuters faced delays and the companies evaluated the damage.
The sudden breakdown on Monday caused the equivalent of 60% of Spain’s energy demand to disappear in five seconds, leaving people blocked in elevators, cutting telephone lines and forcing emergency measures across the country.
The operator of the Spanish grid Red Eléctrica (REE) excluded a cyber attack but admitted two incidents of loss of generation, probably from the South West solar factories, triggered the system failure.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that no hypothesis had been rejected, the High Court of Spain launched an investigation into a possible terrorist involvement.
“We must not rush to conclusions and make mistakes by haste,” said Sánchez on Tuesday. “We will discover what happened in these five seconds.”
Ree said that power failure has disrupted Spain’s interconnection with France.
The country, a leader of renewable energies, faced a renewed control over the stability of a grid strongly dependent on the solar energy and intermittent wind with limited battery storage.
The RBC investment bank estimated the economic cost of the electricity failure between 2.25 billion euros and 4.5 billion euros, criticizing the complacency of the Spanish government’s infrastructure.
A state of emergency has been declared in several Spanish regions, deployment of 30,000 police officers. In Madrid, blocked commuters slept in places like the Movistar Arena, while the workers of the Red Cross distributed covers at Atocha station.
Companies such as Granja Isabel Bar in Barcelona were faced with significant losses after the refrigerators and freezers were offline for more than eight hours.
“We are afraid that it goes bad … We do not know if the insurance will cover it,” said owner Maria Luisa Piñol.
In Portugal, hospitals, airports and metro services have resumed, although delays have persisted in Lisbon.
Experts have noted that modern energy systems can be vulnerable during the combination of intermittent renewable sources with traditional gas and nuclear factories.
Professor Victor Becerra of the University of Portsmouth explained that a major failure in a field can trigger protective closings elsewhere.
Sánchez rejected the idea that dependence on renewable energies caused the collapse, stressing that Spanish nuclear power plants had not taken over the operations either.
“What happened yesterday was an exceptional event in normal and daily circumstances,” he said.
