Major power outage on the Iberian Peninsula on Monday 28th April 2025

Frequent (and even casual) readers of WattClarity® will understand that this is a service provided by Global-Roam Pty Ltd, (an Australian company) that is primarily focused on what’s happening in the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM)

… which has itself been subject to a higher-than-usual amount of discussion these past few weeks given vastly different plans of the two major political parties in the looming Federal Election on Saturday 3rd May 2025.

However from time-to-time we also notice, and provide some commentary on, what’s happened in other parts of the world.

Another event happened within the past 24 hours that falls into the basket, and that’s a major power outage on the Iberian Peninsula in south-western Europe.  This provided some distraction for some of our team early this morning  (our time) as we woke to the news and plenty of updates on social media, though obviously more consternation closer to home in Europe.

In this article we’re just going to acknowledge the event, and the concerns, and may find time to have more of a deeper look (albeit second or third hand, as we’re not collecting data ourselves – not for a number of years, since we suspended the ‘LiveGen’ experiment).

From the grid operators

Readers should be very clear that this outage spans more than just the electricity networks in Spain (i.e. including Portugal and perhaps even parts of southern France), but the Spanish Grid operator Red Eléctrica has put together a very handy live dashboard to show what’s happening across the electricity networks of Spain.

Winding back to yesterday European time (i.e. Monday 28th April 2025) in a form of ‘time travel’ we can generate the following image that helps to provide some overall context – though readers should not forget that the issues are broader than just what happened in Spain:

From this image we can see:

1)  Just prior to the power incident (i.e. at 12:25 local time) the Spanish grid appeared to be:

(a)  consuming ~27,000MW;

(b)  from supply of ~34,000MW (of which only 7,000MW was non-renewable and ~27,000MW was renewable)

(c)  meaning net exports of ~7,000MW

2)  Something (or perhaps several factors) triggered a major disruption between 12;30 and 12:35;

3)  This meant that by 12:45 (say):

(a)  consumption had dropped by ~13,000MW down to ~14,000MW;

(b)  Supply had dropped by more than this (down by ~20,500MW) to ~13,500MW … of which:

i.   ~2,200MW was non-renewable (down by ~4,800MW, including what looks like a sudden trip of some units); and

ii.  ~11,300MW of renewable was renewable (down by ~15,700MW)

(c)  meaning net exports of ~7,000MW

4)  There was some further reduction in supply after this point, including coincident with demand progressively being brought onstream.

5)  Power restoration was a slow process.

From mainstream media

It’s obviously early days in unpicking the event (and that’s not our role – we’ll be waiting, along with everyone else!) but we noted some coverage on mainstream* media in places like:

 * noting that this is English-speaking mainstream media, with my apologies to those who are not so Luddite as me and able to be multi-lingual.

1)  On the BBC there’s articles including live coverage currently titled ‘Power begins to return after mass blackouts hit Spain and Portugal’ – including the paragraphs:

2)  On the Guardian there’s jasper Jolly’s article ‘Spain and Portugal power outage: what caused it, and was there a cyber-attack?’ – including the paragraphs:

‘The Portuguese prime minister, Luís Montenegro, said that the issue originated in Spain. Portugal’s REN said a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” had caused a severe imbalance in temperatures that led to the widespread shutdowns.

REN said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”

The risks posed to electrical systems by big variations in atmospheric temperatures are well known in the industry, even if it is rare for problems to manifest on this scale.

“Due to the variation of the temperature, the parameters of the conductor change slightly,” said Taco Engelaar, managing director at Neara, a software provider to energy utilities. “It creates an imbalance in the frequency.”

Georg Zachmann, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels thinktank, said the system had suffered “cascading disconnections of power plants” – including one in France – when the frequency of the grid dropped below the European standard of 50Hz.’

3)  On Reuters there’s ‘Power begins to return after huge outage hits Spain and Portugal’. that includes these paragraphs which help to illustrate both the complexity, and the speculations:

‘The cause was unclear, with Portugal suggesting the issue originated in Spain and Spain pointing the finger at a break-up in its connection to France.

Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro said there was “no indication” a cyberattack had caused the blackout, which began around 1033 GMT.

Nonetheless, rumours circulated of possible sabotage, and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said he had spoken to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.

Sanchez said that the country had suffered a loss of 15GW of electricity generation in five seconds, equivalent to 60% of national demand. Technicians were working to figure out why that sudden drop occurred, he said.’

…. and also …

‘Earlier, parts of France suffered a brief outage. RTE, the French grid operator, said it had moved to supplement power to some parts of northern Spain after the outage hit.’

4)  On the Australian ABC there’s the article ‘How a power outage caused chaos in Spain and Portugal’.

… and no doubt many more…