Spain and Portugal Power Outage Lasts 8 Hours, Gradually Restores Power

A large-scale power outage occurred around noon on the 28th in most parts of Spain and Portugal, prompting Spain to declare a state of emergency. The governments of Spain and Portugal have stated at the earliest that there is currently no evidence to suggest the outage is related to a terrorist attack.

This sudden power outage on the Iberian Peninsula affected Spain and Portugal, even leaving trains and traffic signals without power, causing traffic jams. The neighboring southern France also experienced power outages.

After 8 hours, power supply gradually resumed in various regions, but the cause of the power outage still requires further investigation.

Spain's grid operator REE said it was due to a sudden and significant drop in power supply, causing the transmission network link between Spain and France to be disrupted.

Prieto, the system operations manager of REE, told the media that the scale of this power supply interruption exceeded the design tolerance range of the European system, causing the Spain-France grid connection to break, which in turn dragged down the Spanish grid.

Portugal's national energy grid company REN said the massive power outage in Portugal was due to a "Spanish grid fault." Due to extreme temperature changes in Spain, ultra-high voltage cables experienced abnormal oscillations, a phenomenon called "induced atmospheric vibration." These oscillations caused a synchronization failure between power systems, leading to successive failures in the interconnected European grid.

REN noted that considering the complexity of the power outage situation, full normalization of the grid might take up to a week.

As power gradually returns, lights finally reappear across the Iberian Peninsula, allowing people to enter and exit buildings normally. Reports indicate that power supply has stabilized in most regions, but repair work continues in some urban areas.

A resident of Madrid said, “I don’t know if everything is restored, but it looks like there's finally electricity. Without lights, we truly don't know how to live.”

This sudden power outage especially affected transportation. Multiple train stations and airports in Spain and Portugal were paralyzed, forcing many passengers to be stranded. Some train passengers even reluctantly disembarked and walked along the tracks.

One stranded passenger said, “They didn’t give us any information. We’ve been waiting here for four hours, I just can’t understand how this could happen.”

However, due to the extensive scope and far-reaching impact of the power outage, detailed reasons still require further investigation.