Spain Perplexed by Cause of Power Blackout

Tens of millions of people in Spain and Portugal lost power in a massive blackout on Monday—"Pain as Spain mainly off the mains," as the Metro put it. But two days later, authorities don't appear to be any closer to finding out how it happened. "We are collecting thousands of data points from the energy system to shed light on what happened," Sara Aagesen, one of the country's deputy prime ministers, said after meetings with senior officials Wednesday, per the New York Times. "We don't know the cause, which is why the investigation is essential." Officials have downplayed suggestions that a cyberattack could have caused one of Europe's worst blackouts in decades, but they haven't ruled it out, the AP reports.

Experts have said there does not appear to be any atmospheric or weather-related cause. Spain and Portugal lead Europe in renewable energy use; the two countries were getting around 80% of their power from solar and wind at the time of the blackout, but experts do not believe fluctuations in sun and wind are to blame, the Guardian reports. "The nature and scale of the outage makes it unlikely that the volume of renewables was the cause, with the Spanish network more often than not subject to very high volumes of such production,' says Daniel Muir, a European power analyst at S&P Global.

Aagesen defended Spain's use of renewable power Wednesday. "Thanks to renewables, we are a much more competitive country, because they are affordable and use local resources. In Spain, we don't have fossil fuels, we don't have uranium, but we do have sun and wind," she said, per El Pais. Analysts say there were huge fluctuations in power before the grid failed Monday, but it's not clear what caused the instability. "There's a variety of things that usually happen at the same time, and it's very difficult for any event to say 'this was the root cause,'" says Eamonn Lannoye, managing director at the Electric Power Research Institute, Europe, per the AP. "This could be a really complex event, I think it's fair to say." (More blackout stories.)