Madrid, grid operator play the blame game over blackout

Spain’s prime minister has accused the country’s electricity companies of ‘excessive opacity’ over the power blackout that paralysed the Iberian peninsula.

The power cut affected the entire Iberian peninsula and the south of France. Picture; AFP.

Tensions are rising between the Spanish government and electricity companies over the still unknown cause of a power blackout that paralysed the Iberian peninsula.

Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s Socialist prime minister, took aim at energy companies, saying he would “demand all relevant responsibilities from all private operators”. He met energy company directors on Tuesday and posted on X that he had “asked them to co-operate with the government … in identifying the cause of the incident”.

Sanchez is furious with Red Electrica, reported El Pais, a newspaper close to the government, for the grid operator’s “excessive opacity … and [for] not giving a clear explanation of what happened”.

Jordi Juan, editor of La Vanguardia, a Catalan newspaper broadly supportive of Sanchez, said: “What seems clear is that the government does not want to take the blame for the disaster and, by raising the responsibility of the operating companies, it opens the door to not being the only one to receive the blows.”

Monday’s outage, one of the worst yet in Europe, started in the afternoon and lasted into the night, affecting tens of millions of people across the peninsula. It disrupted businesses, hospitals, transit systems, cellular networks and other critical infrastructure.

The Spanish grid operator, which is 20 per cent state-owned, said that its preliminary assessment had ruled out a cyberattack as the cause but Sanchez has refused to discount “any hypothesis” to explain the blackout.

Jose Ignacio Sanchez Galan, executive chairman of Iberdrola, a big power supplier, said yesterday that Red Electrica should clarify the reasons behind the massive power outage.

Another energy director told the Spanish daily newspaper ABC: “Only Red Electrica knows how the system operates as a whole and which production centres must be activated or deactivated – no operator can connect or disconnect on his own without an order or authorisation from it.”

Beatriz Corredor, head of Red Electrica and a former Socialist minister, rejected calls for her to resign and defended the company, claiming: “We have the best system in Europe.”

She downplayed a recent report by the firm that warned of “severe” risks of power cuts linked to the “high” use of renewable energy in the country. Renewable energy production was safe, she said, and “linking Monday’s serious incident to the penetration of renewables is not correct”. The annual financial report that warned about renewable power was merely listing potential risks as it is required to do by law, she added.

Red Electrica has also suggested that private companies may be linked to the incident, saying it was possibly related to solar power.

Government sources told El Diario, a left-wing news site, that companies feared potential legal claims that could amount to tens of millions of euros. The government’s populist left-wing coalition partner Sumar demanded answers from the “energy oligopoly” and called for the electricity network to be brought “100 per cent under public control”.

Spain’s national energy security strategy is ten years old and obsolete, Spanish media reported. The government deemed its renewal to be of vital importance five years ago but a delay was caused by the pandemic, among other factors.

The Times