By Pietro Lombardi and Marta Serafinko<\/p>\n
April 17 (Reuters) – Spain’s energy and competition regulator said on Friday it had opened formal probes into the country’s \u200clargest energy companies and the power grid operator over last year’s unprecedented \u200cblackout in Spain and Portugal, after finding evidence that some power sector rules were breached over extended \u200bperiods.<\/p>\n
The watchdog opened probes into grid operator Red Electrica – a unit of Redeia – as well as energy companies Iberdrola, Naturgy, Endesa and Repsol. It also said it was investigating individual power plants.<\/p>\n
Iberdrola and Endesa declined to comment. The other named companies did not immediately \u200creply to requests for comment.<\/p>\n
A \u2060number of investigations have analysed the causes of the massive outage, which plunged large parts of Spain and Portugal into darkness for \u2060up to 16 hours on April 28, 2025. Most focused on identifying the causes, without assigning blame.<\/p>\n
The National Commission on Markets and Competition, or CNMC, said that while the violations \u200bdid not \u200bcause the blackout, they may have affected \u200bpower system operations and could amount \u200cto administrative infringements, requiring a formal investigation.<\/p>\n
The names of the companies being probed were disclosed on the watchdog’s website after the market close.<\/p>\n
In a report last month, the CNMC recommended measures to mitigate voltage swings in the power grid following the blackout, as well as boosting French power links. It did not assign blame, saying it \u200cwas examining potential breaches separately.<\/p>\n
On Friday, the CNMC \u200bsaid it found a chain of events that progressively \u200bdestabilised the power system and \u200bculminated in the April 28, 2025 outage, whose immediate cause was \u200ca surge in voltage.<\/p>\n
It added that some \u200bsuspected breaches had persisted \u200bfor long periods, but said this did not amount to assigning responsibility for the origin of the blackout to the companies involved.<\/p>\n
The proceedings can last \u200bbetween nine and 18 months, \u200cdepending on the seriousness of any infringement, and affected parties will be \u200bable to submit arguments and evidence.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Marta Serafinko and Pietro Lombardi. \u200bEditing by David Latona and Mark Potter)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Pietro Lombardi and Marta Serafinko April 17 (Reuters) – Spain’s energy and competition regulator said on Friday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6460,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3862,4348,17,2530],"class_list":["post-6459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-spain","tag-cnmc","tag-energy-companies","tag-spain","tag-spain-and-portugal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6459\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}