A broad power cut overturned life during millions in Spain and Portugal, and, for letters, parts of France, Monday.
The traffic lights darkened, the trains stopped, the closed companies and the long lines were formed in ATMs and grocery stores, where the credit card readers stopped working.
The interruption lasted almost 18 hours in some areas. But as some of the main officials of Spain convince Wednesday morning to discuss the blackout, the cause was still under investigation.
Power has been restored mainly.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez or Spain said the country had recovered more than 95 percent of the total energy supply at 6:30 am on Tuesday. The Ministry of Interior of the country on Tuesday night deactivated most emergency statements that had activated the duration of the blackout.
In Portugal, the Electricity and Gas provider REN said that energy has been restored to all substations in the country’s network and that everything was “100 percent operational.”
The operator of the electricity grid in France, where the interruption briefly affected households in the Basque region, said that all energy had been restored.
The cause remains under investigation.
The National Security Council of Spain was a pact on Wednesday morning to discuss the blackout.
On Tuesday, Eduardo Prieto, services director of the Electric Company of Spain, Red Electric, said they were not “definitive conclusions” about the reasons for the interruption, although he and other officials ruled out a cyber attack.
Sanchez said that a technical expert committee of the European Commission would investigate the causes. He said he was waiting for answers within “hours or days”, although others said he could have been carrying out an exhaustive analysis for a week.
Mr. Sánchez also said at a press conference on Tuesday that the Cryptological National Center, the National Intelligence Agency of the Department of Spain by Cyberthreats, was reviewing “the risks derived from this electrical emergency.”
Some initial facts on the blackout source have emerged. Around noon on Monday, a high voltage connection between France and Spain was interrupted, according to Kristian Ruby, general secretary of Eurelectric, a commercial body that repeats the European electrical industry. The energy cut occurred about 30 minutes later.
While that interruption would have expected the leg to be disruptive, it would usually not lead to a “collapse of the system” like the one that happened on Monday, Ruby said. Some other complications would normally need to happen, “as a sudden interruption in an energy plant, a sudden development on the demand side,” he said. “Then you can have an incident like this.”
The National Energy Supplier of Portugal, E-Redes, cited a “problem not specified in the European Electricity.”
Hospitals, banks and trips were interrupted.
Duration of the interruption, there were broad extension problems that connected to the Internet and telephone networks in Spain and Portugal. Mr. Sánchez urged people to make only letter calls to their cell phones.
The hospitals in Spain were forced to postulate with generators. Portuguese banks and schools closed. The National Railway Company of Spain said the trains had stopped working at all stations. They stopped the subway in several cities, including Valencia and Madrid. The Madrid Tennis Tournament was suspended. And people got into stores to buy food and other essential elements, since employees used pencil and paper to record transactions only in cash.
Diana Alfia, an employee of a shelter in Lisbon, said that some people had gone to the beach since there was not much more to do, and some tourists walked miles from the airport to the city because Uber and public transport were not Aviabale.
The power went in the midst of high temperatures.
According to the Spanish weather agency, Aemet, temperatures throughout the country were between 60 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit at the time of energy cut. At the end of the day, the maximums had risen between 82 and 87 degrees.
That was higher than usual: in April, temperatures in Spain average around 64 degrees in the central and northern regions and approximately 70 degrees in the south.
When asked if the interruption was connected to heat, Bruno Silva, a REN spokesman, was skeptical. “No, I hope no,” he said.
Other European interruptions have stopped daily life.
More than 50 million people in Italy were in the dark for almost a full day in 2003 after a line between Switzerland and Italy was overloaded. He was considered the worst day of blackout in the country since World War II.
In 2006, 10 million people in Germany were letters without power after the northwest part of the country’s electricity network was overloaded.
And last year, much of the balances was without energy for several hours of a heat wave in which temperatures rose to 40 degrees Celsius, or more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Electrical networks in Europe are interconnected, and an overload or problem in one area can be extended to another country.
Nazaneen Ghaffar” Mike Iives and John Yoon Contributed reports.
