Spain and Portugal race to restore vital infrastructure after massive blackout

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Authorities in Spain and Portugal were rushing on Tuesday to get transport networks and infrastructure running again after a massive power outage brought the two countries to a standstill.

Widespread disruption continued in Madrid, Barcelona and other cities after Monday’s blackout paralysed transport and communications across much of Spain and Portugal.

Spain’s grid operator, Red Eléctrica, said that by 7am local time on Tuesday almost 100 per cent of energy demand had been restored after millions spent the night in darkness. The operator later said the electricity system was working normally across the country.

The Portuguese government said power had been fully restored across the country and that Lisbon’s metro, which had been suspended, would restart services on Tuesday.

King Felipe will chair a meeting of Spain’s security council later on Tuesday morning as authorities try to restore some normality after declaring a state of emergency on Monday.

Thousands of stranded travellers were forced to spend the night in railway stations around the country while passengers were left stranded on a dozen trains until late into the night.

Almost 24 hours after the outage began, authorities have yet to give a cause for the power cut. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said in a television address late on Monday that all “potential causes are being analysed”.

Spain’s centre-right opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo criticised Sánchez for a lack of communication over the crisis, saying the government was “still overwhelmed”.

“We’ve had an electrical blackout, we’ve had a telecoms blackout and now we have an information blackout. It’s difficult to explain this, it’s clearly intolerable,” Feijóo told Esradio.

Feijóo also attacked the government’s plan to phase out nuclear power from 2027, arguing it would leave the grid more vulnerable to fluctuations in renewable power generation.

Spain’s electricity system collapsed at 12.33pm on Monday when 15GW of power supply — equivalent to 60 per cent of nationwide demand — was lost in only five seconds, Sánchez explained. The authorities are still trying to establish why.

“This has never happened before,” Sánchez said.

With such a serious imbalance between supply and demand, the grid shut down and interconnections with France and Morocco were lost. Only when these cross-border links were established could supply be gradually restored, enabling power to be returned to the grid.

Spain’s national rail operator Renfe said on Tuesday that some services would operate normally, including trains between Madrid and Barcelona.

Some suburban trains around Madrid were resuming and most metro services restarted at 8am local time. However, commuter trains around Barcelona were completely suspended because of the erratic power supply and there were no trains at all in Galicia, in the north-west of the country.

Aena, Spain’s biggest airport operator, warned of continued disruption but flight cancellations at Madrid and Barcelona were down sharply from Monday.

More than 700 flights, roughly one in 10, were cancelled on Monday, according to aviation data company Cirium.

Lisbon airport continued to face disruption on Tuesday morning, with average delays for arriving flights of more than one hour, according to flight tracking service Flightradar24.

Spain is one of the countries at the forefront of efforts to rely more on renewable electricity as part of the shift away from fossil fuels, but Monday’s crisis is likely to fuel concerns about power networks’ ability to cope with demand and the increased volatility of supply from renewables.

Spain generates about 43 per cent of its power from wind and solar but grid and storage capacity has not kept pace with the rapid development of renewable energy.

Additional reporting by Philip Georgiadis in London

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