Spain and
Portugal power outage: what caused it, and was there a cyber-attack?
Several
countries in Europe have been scrambling to restore electricity after a huge
power cut caused blackouts
Jasper Jolly
Mon 28 Apr
2025 17.38 BST
Spain,
Portugal and some of south-west France suffered a massive power cut on Monday,
with major cities including Madrid, Barcelona and Lisbon among those affected.
Houses,
offices, trains, traffic lights and even the Madrid open tennis tournament were
all hit, causing chaos for millions of people and prompting a scramble by the
Spanish and Portuguese governments and network operators to understand the
problem and race to fix it.
What
happened?
Red
Eléctrica de España (REE), Spain’s electric network, said Spain and Portugal
were hit by “el cero” – the zero. Its Portuguese counterpart, Redes Energéticas
Nacionais (REN), said the outage started at 11:33am Western European summer
time.
By
mid-afternoon the Spanish operator, which is partly state-owned, said that it
had started to recover voltage in the north, south and west of the Iberian
peninsula. The recovery process could only be carried out gradually, to avoid
overloading parts of the grid as each generator connects.
Endesa,
Spain’s largest energy utility with 10 million customers, and Iberdrola, the
second largest provider, said they were working with REE in accordance with
established protocols.
What caused
it?
The
Portuguese prime minister, Luís Montenegro, said that the issue originated in
Spain. Portugal’s REN said a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” had caused a severe
imbalance in temperatures that led to the widespread shutdowns.
REN said:
“Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were
anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon
known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused
synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive
disturbances across the interconnected European network.”
The risks
posed to electrical systems by big variations in atmospheric temperatures are
well known in the industry, even if it is rare for problems to manifest on this
scale.
“Due to the
variation of the temperature, the parameters of the conductor change slightly,”
said Taco Engelaar, managing director at Neara, a software provider to energy
utilities. “It creates an imbalance in the frequency.”
Georg
Zachmann, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels thinktank, saidthe system had
suffered “cascading disconnections of power plants” – including one in France –
when the frequency of the grid dropped below the European standard of 50Hz.
Could it
have been it foul play?
The European
Council president, António Costa, who was Portugal’s prime minister from 2015
to 2024, said “there is no evidence that it was a cyber-attack”, but cautioned
that the ultimate cause was still unclear. Senior European Commission
vice-president Teresa Ribera also told Spain’s Radio 5 that there was no
evidence of a deliberate act having caused the outage.
However,
Spain’s national security council was convened on Monday to assess the outage.
Portugal’s prime minister said it was too early to say for sure what caused the
blackout.
What is the
role of renewables?
Spain is on
its way to being a green energy leader: it has abundant sun and wind. Last year
was a record period for renewable power generation, which accounted for 56% of
all electricity used. By 2030 that proportion will rise to 81%.
That shift
will help Spain end its reliance on energy imports, but it also brings its own
challenges. Every national grid in the world will need to spend heavily to
upgrade distribution systems to connect scattered renewable generation and
ensure it is balanced.
What is grid
balancing?
The grid
needs constant management to ensure it is not overloaded by too much
generation, or left short by too little. Power stations will shut down
automatically if the frequency breaks out of normal range. To restart they must
then be reconnected to users.
Balancing
has been important as long as there has been a grid, but there is more focus on
the issue because of the rapid switch to renewables like solar and wind, which
are intermittent.
Spinning gas
turbines have been the standard technology for managing the frequency for
decades, but renewables will need investment in other options such as flywheels
or advanced power electronics.
“You cannot
ignore it,” Zachmann said. “You need the tools to keep the system running.”
Did
international connections cause problems?
Engelaar
said such a widespread failure was “extremely unusual”. However, there have
been previous examples. In 2003 a problem with a hydroelectric power line
between Italy and Switzerland caused a huge outage across Italy for about 12
hours. A 2006 German power overload caused outages as far away as Portugal and
Morocco.
“Interconnection
between countries is vital for sharing clean energy, but it also creates new
pathways for failure to spread quickly,” Engelaar said.
However,
Bruegel’s Zachmann said that interconnections also help to prevent problems
from getting worse. The interconnector with France will make it “much easier to
bring the electricity system back”. “Yes, problems spill over but at the same
time the larger system acts as a buffer and prevents the crisis escalating,” he
said.
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