Blackout in Spain and Portugal: what happened at the beginning

A sudden loss of power generation at a substation in Granada in southern Spain, followed by outages seconds later in Badajoz and Seville, triggered the unprecedented blackout across Spain and Portugal on April 28, according to the Spanish government. As Spain's third Vice President and Minister for Ecological Transition, Sara Aagesen, explained on Wednesday, the problem that led to the total blackout in the Iberian Peninsula began with three consecutive blackouts in the provinces of Granada, Badajoz and Seville.

In an appearance before the Chamber of Deputies, which was reported by the Spanish daily newspaper El País, among others, Aagesen said that the three incidents resulted in a loss of 2.2 gigawatts of electricity within 20 seconds. "Immediately afterwards, the phase of cascading overvoltage shutdown began" – and subsequently caused the entire system to collapse.

According to the minister, the government located the start of the chain of disruptions in three provinces in the south of Spain. The first power outage was detected three seconds before 12:33 pm on April 28 in a substation in the province of Granada; only 19 seconds later there was another outage in another substation in the province of Badajoz and 20 seconds later in another substation in Seville.

Cause remains unclear

However,the question of the cause of the biggest power outage in Spain's history remains unanswered. During her appearance, Aagesen denied indications of a cyber attack on the infrastructure of the Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica de España (REE), which is responsible for security of supply, according to El País. "No evidence has been found, and that is good news," she said. However, this does not rule out the possibility of an attack on power plants or other phases of the electricity grid, the paper continued. Investigations are continuing at the control centers of the electricity suppliers and at the generation plants. However, with every day that passes without evidence emerging, the trail of a cyber attack loses momentum, according to the assessment of Spain's largest daily newspaper.

The minister also pointed out that in the half hour before the blackout, two oscillations were detected in the electricity grid on the Iberian Peninsula and in other parts of Europe. "In the half hour before the incident, two oscillation periods (power and frequency fluctuations) were observed in the continental European synchronous area," the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) published the cross-regional oscillations – the technical term for such disturbances – on Friday. According to Aagesen, your government is investigating whether these oscillations "have anything to do with the incident".

Protective measures did not work

According to El País, it remains to be clarified why the REE's attempts to limit the blackout to a section of the grid and prevent a total blackout were unsuccessful. Most of the experts interviewed by the newspaper pointed to a failure of the grid operator's protocols and automatic systems. If the security measures had worked correctly, the blackout would only have occurred in some areas of Spain and not on the entire Iberian Peninsula, including Portugal, according to the experts.

During her appearance before the MEPs, Aagesen assured them that after six meetings of the blackout committee, they had come to the conclusion that it was not a problem of reserves or coverage. The widespread blackout was not caused by insufficient scheduled power generation to meet demand or to ensure the safety of the system. On April 28, electricity generation was significantly higher than demand. Minutes before the blackout, Spain was even exporting plenty of electricity to neighboring France, Portugal and Morocco.

The investigation will take some time and there will probably be no easy answers to this complex problem, said Aagesen. "We will not allow haste to keep us from the truth," she said, reiterating that it will take time to analyze the millions of pieces of information being collected by the commission set up by the government. "We are in the process of analyzing millions of pieces of data. We are continuing to make progress in identifying the places where these generation failures have occurred and we already know that they have started in Granada, Badajoz and Seville."

(akn)