Spain has restored more than 99% of its electricity supply after a historic outage that paralysed large parts of Spain and Portugal, authorities said.
Spanish electricity distribution company Red Electrica said the level had been reached by 6am on Tuesday. The outage left thousands of train passengers stranded and millions without mobile phone service, internet or access to cash from ATMs across the Iberian Peninsula.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez had earlier assured that power would be restored across the country of 48 million people by the end of the day.
Red Electrica's head of operations, Eduardo Prieto, described the situation as “exceptional and unusual.”
It was the second major power outage in Europe in less than six weeks, following a March 20 incident when a fire crippled Heathrow Airport in the UK, and comes as authorities across the continent brace for potential Russian-backed sabotage.
In a statement, Portugal's National Cybersecurity Centre stressed that there was no indication that the outage was caused by a cyberattack.
The European Commission's executive vice-president in charge of clean energy, Teresa Ribera, told reporters in Brussels that the power outage was “one of the most serious incidents recorded in Europe in recent times.”
The Spanish prime minister noted that problems in the European energy system had caused a major blackout affecting Spain, Portugal and parts of France.
Mr Sanchez described the problem in the European power grid as a “significant fluctuation” and added that the causes were still being investigated.
The Spanish leader called on the public to avoid speculation and stressed that no theory about the reasons for the shutdown was being ruled out.
“We are considering all possible reasons, without ruling out any hypothesis,” the prime minister said.
He also said that at 12:22 p.m. on Monday, Spain's power grid lost 15 gigawatts, representing 60% of total national demand, in just five seconds.
Sourse: breakingnews.ie
