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Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has called on private energy operators to help his government establish the cause of Monday’s unprecedented power cut across the Iberian peninsula, and said changes and improvements must be made to guarantee “the supply and future competitiveness” of the country’s electrical system.
Spain and Portugal suffered a massive power loss that began just after 12.30pm on Monday and lasted into the night. At least five people are thought to have died in Spain as a result of the blackout, which left people trapped on paralysed trains and in the static lifts of apartment blocks and offices.
Although energy operators in both countries have rejected the possibility of a cyber-attack, Sánchez’s socialist government is refusing to rule out “any hypothesis” and Spain’s highest criminal court has opened an investigation to determine whether “an act of computer sabotage” could have been perpetrated “against critical Spanish infrastructure”.
Portugal’s prime minister, Luís Montenegro, has called for an independent inquiry, saying his government will ask the EU’s Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators to perform “an independent audit of the electrical systems of the affected countries to fully determine the causes of this situation”.
On Tuesday evening, Sánchez summoned private energy operators – including the president of the national grid operator, Red Eléctrica, and representatives of Iberdrola, Endesa, EDP, Acciona Energía and Naturgy – to an urgent meeting to discuss the blackout.
Addressing the nation hours earlier, Sánchez announced the creation of a commission to investigate the incident and to look at the role of private energy companies. He also said he had only found out about Red Eléctrica’s conclusion that the blackout was not down to a cyber-attack through media reports.
In a post on X after the meeting, Sánchez stressed the importance of swift, joint action with the private energy providers.
“I have thanked them for their work to rapidly restore the supply, and I have also asked them to work with the government and independent organisations to identify the causes of the incident,” he said. “We need to undertake the necessary improvements when it comes to guaranteeing the supply and the future competitiveness of our system.”
Sánchez’s political opponents claim he has pushed ahead with plans to prioritise renewable energy over nuclear energy without thinking of the consequences, and is now trying to blame private energy companies for the blackout.
The conservative People’s party (PP) accused the prime minister of waging “an information blackout” over the incident and called for him to appear before congress to give a full account of what he knows about the incident.
“The government has assumed no responsibility, engaged in no self-criticism and it hasn’t even apologised to the people,” PP sources said on Wednesday morning.
The party also pointed out that Red Eléctrica’s president, Beatriz Corredor, is a former minister in the last socialist government.
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The PP’s criticisms come six months after the party was criticised for its slow and inadequate response to the devastating floods that killed 227 people in Valencia, one of the regions it governs. Despite receiving several meteorological warnings about the heavy rains that triggered the floods, the regional government did not send an emergency alert to people’s mobiles until after 8pm on the day of the floods. Valencia’s PP president, Carlos Mazón, also spent three hours having lunch with a journalist when the floods hit and people were drowning in their homes and cars.
The far-right Vox party has also trained its fire on Sánchez, accusing him of a costly ideological aversion to nuclear power, which, it said, had left Spain in the dark.
Sánchez’s has dismissed the criticisms. “Those who link this incident to the lack of nuclear power are frankly lying or demonstrating their ignorance,” Sánchez said on Tuesday, adding that nuclear power generation “was no more resilient” than other electricity sources.
His words did nothing to reassure Vox’s leader, Santiago Abascal, who used a post on X to hit back at the prime minister. “Stop lying so shamelessly,” Abascal said. “The blackout is down to you and your disastrous energy policies. You said this couldn’t happen … Now that it has happened, Sánchez, you need to go and face the judicial consequences.”
The ongoing investigations will focus on what happened at 12.33pm on Monday, when, for five seconds, 15 gigawatts of the energy that was being produced – equivalent to 60% of all the energy that was being used – suddenly disappeared.
