(Madrid) Spain and Portugal created a joint “support group” aimed at identifying the cause of the giant electricity failure which affected the Iberian Peninsula on Monday.
Posted at 9:58 a.m.
“We are going to collaborate to identify the causes of the incident and implement the necessary measures so that this does not happen again,” said Spanish Minister for the Ecological Transition, Sara Aagesen, quoted in a press release from the Madrid government after a videoconference meeting with her counterpart, the Portuguese Minister of Environment and Energy, Maria Da Graça Carvalho.
The two officials also agreed to act in a “coordinated” manner concerning the information that their countries will transmit to European bodies.
Four days after the power cut that plunged the two countries into chaos for several hours, authorities and experts have still not advanced an official explanation on its causes.
-“It is very important to collect all the information to understand what was at the origin of the incident which, as you know, occurred on the Spanish network” of electricity transport, “said the Portuguese minister by reaffirming the position taken by her government from the first hour.
“It’s something very complex and it will therefore take some time. We need a lot of data to understand exactly what happened, ”she added in front of the local media.
According to the Madrid authorities, the equivalent of 60 % of the electricity consumption of Spain, or 15 gigawatts, disappeared in the space of five seconds during the breakdown, which occurred on Monday at 6:33 am (east time), a phenomenon qualified as “unpublished” by the executive.
Several hypotheses have been put forward to explain the cut, including that of a cyber attack, on which Spanish justice has opened an investigation. This track is however considered little credible by the manager of the Spanish electricity network (REE), who assured Tuesday that he had spotted “no intrusion” in its control systems.
In his report of events, Ree indicated that he had identified as possible origin of this collapse two distinct incidents at a second and a half interval, one of which was able to affect a solar production site in the southwest of Spain.
