Government´s Blackout Responsibility Blame-Game
The Spanish Government has finally published the official week into the nationwide blackout that brought the capital and most of the country to halt on 29th April.
At the press conference in Madrid , Spain’s Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen who oversees the country’s energy policies, explained that a series of minor failures – mainly in southern Spain – sparked a ‘chain reaction’, leading to the much larger system-wide outage.
The blackout was caused by ‘overvoltage’ and other ‘multiple’ causes, she said, adding that the system ‘lacked sufficient voltage control capacity’ on that day.
Overvoltage is when there is too much electrical voltage in a network, overloading equipment. It can be caused by surges in networks due to oversupply or lightning strikes, or when protective equipment is insufficient or fails.
When faced with overvoltage on networks protective systems shut down parts of the grid, potentially leading to widespread power outages.
According to the minister, the incident stemmed from multiple technical shortcomings, including ‘poor planning’ by grid operators who failed to replace a power plant crucial for stabilising the system.
She also noted that some smaller substations were shut down as a precaution when the issue began to unfold, though those stations might have helped stabilise the grid if kept online.
Aagesen singled out the role of the Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica (REE) and certain energy companies she did not name which disconnected their plants ‘inappropriately … to protect their installations’.
She also pointed to ‘insufficient voltage control capacity’ on the system that day, due in part to a programming flaw, stressing that Spain’s grid is theoretically robust enough to handle such situations.
Due to these misjudgements ‘we reached a point of no return with an uncontrollable chain reaction’ that could only have been managed if steps had been taken beforehand to absorb the overvoltage problems, she added.
Aagesen acknowledged that ‘vulnerabilities’ and ‘deficiencies’ had been identified in Spain’s power grid security systems. She said corrective measures would be proposed.
She definitively ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack being behind the incident.
The outage began abruptly just after 12.30pm local time on 28 April and persisted until nightfall, severely affecting businesses, public transport, mobile networks, Internet services and other key infrastructure.
Approximately 15 gigawatts of power were lost in Spain – amounting to around 60% of its supply. Portugal, which shares an interconnected grid with Spain, also experienced significant disruption.
On the Iberian Peninsula, only the British overseas territory of Gibraltar remained unaffected.
‘All of this happened in 12 seconds, with most of the power loss happening in just five seconds,’ Aagesen said.
Full electricity service was restored during the early morning hours of the next day.
The official investigation also involved Spain’s national security agencies, which, as Aagesen stated, found no signs pointing to cyber-sabotage or foreign interference.
In the days and weeks following the blackout, both experts and the public were left speculating about the underlying cause of such an event in a region not typically associated with large-scale power failures. This speculation included questions over whether Spain’s significant reliance on renewable energy played a role.
Spain is considered a leader in Europe’s green energy transition, with nearly 57% of its electricity in 2024 coming from renewable sources such as wind, solar and hydroelectric power. The country is also in the process of retiring its nuclear plants.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez rejected claims that renewables contributed to the failure, reaffirming his administration’s commitment to its energy goals. He urged the public to remain calm and stated that the government would not ‘deviate a single millimetre’ from its plan to achieve 81% renewable electricity generation by 2030.
