Traffic lights were back on, train and metro services slowly returned and schools reopened. Commuters battled with delays to get back to work after an outage that had left people stranded in lifts and cut off from phone contact with their families.
While Spanish grid operator REE on Tuesday ruled out a cyber attack as the cause, Spain’s High Court said it would investigate whether the country’s energy infrastructure had suffered a terrorist strike and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said his government had not ruled out any hypothesis.
REE said it had identified two incidents of power generation loss, probably from solar plants, in Spain’s southwest that caused instability in the electric system and led to a breakdown of its interconnection with France.
Investment bank RBC said the economic cost of the blackout could range between 2.25 billion and 4.5 billion euros, blaming the Spanish government for being too complacent about infrastructure in a system dependent on solar power with little battery storage.
Javier Diaz, a 24-year-old student, was forced to sleep in Madrid’s Movistar Arena, a music venue, after finding himself stranded in the capital. Luckily, he had just finished walking the Camino de Santiago, a Christian pilgrimage route in northern Spain, and had a sleeping bag, “so we had quite a good night”.
“We’ll have to be lucky for one with a bit more space inside so we can get in,“ he said.
Bars and restaurants counted the cost of lost produce after fridges and freezers were switched off for more than eight hours.
In Portugal, the government said hospitals were back up and running, airports were operational albeit with delays in Lisbon, while the capital’s metro was restarting operations and trains were running.
“Whatever the cause, a major failure in one area can place sudden pressure on neighbouring systems, causing protective shutdowns to prevent further damage,“ Becerra said.
Sanchez on Tuesday ruled out an excess of renewable energy as a cause of the network’s collapse. He said Spain’s nuclear power stations still hadn’t resumed operating on Tuesday, which he said showed they were no more resilient than renewables.
“What happened yesterday was an exceptional event in normal, everyday circumstances,“ Sanchez said.
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