Spain has been hit by another big power cut, affecting tens of thousands of people on the Canary Islands.
Several municipalities on La Palma have been left without power supply by a failure affecting particularly the north of the island. Radio Canaria reported that the blackout had affected about 30,000 people. Alberto Hernández, director-general of energy for the government of the Canary Islands, told Europa Press that 20,000 customers had been affected.
At present, the origin of the blackout is unknown, but officials pointed to a possible problem at the Los Guinchos power station.
It is only ten days since a power cut brought mainland Spain and Portugal to a standstill. The Spanish islands of the Canaries and Balearic islands were not affected by that power cut.
Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, is under fire from the conservative opposition for having failed so far to give a reason for the widespread blackout. “I know that Spaniards want to know what happened and they want to know as soon as possible,” he said as he addressed parliament on Wednesday for the first time since the blackout, before warning that this would “take time”.
Sánchez has angered private energy giants by taking aim at them, saying he will hold them to account and sending officials to the companies to investigate the incident.
The Spanish High Court said it would open an inquiry into whether the power cut was caused by a cyberattack. Red Eléctrica, which runs Spain’s electricity grid, has ruled this out but the government has not.
Spain suffered several power glitches and industry officials sounded repeated warnings about the instability of its power grid in the build up to the incident. There had been two significant “disconnection events” — interruptions in power — before the outage, Red Eléctrica said.
Although the Spanish grid managed to recover from the first event, the systems operations director Eduardo Prieto said that the second had been more damaging, progressing to the point of interruptions from the French electrical system and producing “a massive, temporary disconnection”.
Attention in Spain is focused on renewable energy generation after Red Electrica said the outage may have been linked to it. Spain is a leader in solar and wind power generation, and more than half of its energy last year came from renewable sources. Portugal also generates a majority of its energy from renewable sources.
One theory is that non-renewable energy sources, such as coal and natural gas, can better weather the type of fluctuations of the sort that affected the Spanish grid.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the conservative main opposition People’s Party, said: “You were so intent on being the greenest in the world that you have led Spaniards into the dark. Your duty is to accept that your energy model has failed.”
Madrid was severely affected by the power cuts about ten days ago
JUAN CARLOS HIDALGO/EPA
Tensions are also rising over the government’s plan to phase out nuclear energy. Sánchez said the nuclear lobby was the one creating links to renewables and that the opposition’s use of the outage to further the argument for nuclear energy was a “giant manipulation”. He said: “Spain will not deviate even a millimetre from its green model.”
Feijóo countered by asking how Sánchez could rule out renewable energy as the cause of the power cut when he had not given a reason for the outage.
Sánchez told parliament that “ultra-rich” energy executives should pay to keep nuclear plants running as his government plans to phase them out. The proposal should be viable “and not at a cost to taxpayers’ pockets but at a cost to the pockets of the ultra-rich executives who run the energy companies that own nuclear plants”, he said.
Sánchez has a history of clashing with companies and executives publicly, sometimes by naming them personally.
Sara Aagesen, the Spanish energy minister, said it was usually the islands that had the most problems as they were isolated. She added that, on La Palma, renewable energy generation accounted for less than 1 per cent of electricity production. Hernández said that the regional government had already declared an energy emergency in the islands due to obsolete installations in the archipelago.
Hernández said the measures adopted would take a year to be implemented on all the islands, but that work was being done to ensure that these breakdowns did not happen or happened as little as possible, although he clarified: “Incidents do happen.”