We rarely think about how essential and reliable electricity grids are until they fail.
Now, millions of people across Spain, Portugal and parts of France are likely thinking of little else.
While local power cuts are fairly common, what’s happened across the Iberian peninsula is something far more extreme.
Much of Spain and Portugal’s electricity transmission system collapsed in seconds including in major cities Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona and Seville.
Blackouts latest: ‘Rare atmospheric phenomenon’ behind outages
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
‘Confusion’ as blackouts hit Spain
It’s likely the outage will surpass Europe’s largest blackout to date when 56 million people in Italy and Switzerland lost power for up to 12 hours in 2003.
The cause of the outage is unclear. Portugal’s grid operator has blamed a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” that caused “anomalous oscillations” in high voltage power lines in Spain.
Spain’s grid operator has yet to respond to that or provide an update on the cause. But it’s unlikely whatever caused the outage was a single, localised event.
A major power line going down can cause a large outage – as it did in 2021, when an interconnector between France and Spain failed leaving a million people without power…
