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Spain-Portugal blackouts: what happened

By analysing minute-by minute data, we can pinpoint the moment where it all went wrong for Spain’s power grid.

This situation had been repeated throughout the month, as in Spain the combined capacity of solar and wind energy can, given the right conditions, cover the country’s entire electricity demand during the brightest hours in the middle of the day. The country’s nuclear plants, as planned, were operating at half their usual capacity because, according to their owners, the high charges they are subject to make them economically unviable during periods when the price of electricity is very low. Within hours of the outage on 28 April, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez raised suspicions that the origin of the blackout came from “private operators”, and he accused those arguing that more nuclear input would help stabilise the grid of being ignorant.

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