Five seconds for a historical crisis. Electricity, restored 99% in Spain and Portugal, but a big question remains after the current

The authorities have not identified the cause of the current fall of the Iberian Peninsula, and the two scenarios – a cyber attack or a meteorological phenomenon – are not yet supported by evidence, writes Reuters and El Pais, citing official sources.

For five seconds, Monday, at 12:33 pm local time, 15 gigawatts (GW) from electricity production suddenly disappeared from the Spanish system.

According to government sources quoted by Reuters, this quantity was equivalent to 60% of the electricity consumed in the country at that time. It only took these five seconds for chaos to unleash.

The system gave up, but the cause remains unknown. Until the massive current left continental Spain and Portugal without electricity.

“In the 40 years since I was in this sector, I have never seen such a thing before,” said Jorge Fabra, who was president of Red Electrica, the national election operator for a decade.

The main question that remains is what happened. “We do not exclude any hypothesis,” said Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

“We do not know the causes,” he insisted, increasing the uncertainty around this historical current in the country.

Network has been restored but some problems remain

Electricity was restored 99%, in most of Spain and Portugal on Tuesday morning.

In Spain, schools and offices have reopened, public transport has restrained after long delays, traffic jams were attenuated and many hospitals resumed their electricity supply from the network, while others continued to operate with generators.

Red Electrica said he was able to satisfy the whole country's electricity demand on Tuesday morning, while the Portuguese counterpart, REN said that, until late, all 89 electric substances in the country were restored.

It is the transport that has not fully recovered to normal, after the crisis on Monday, when trains, subway and airports stopped working, and travelers were forced to sleep in stations and airports.

Authorities are now pressed to explain what caused one of the largest current feathers ever registered in Europe.

The instability of the network caused the separation of electrical interconnection between Spain and France through the Pyrenees, which led to a general collapse of the Spanish system, reporters told Monday evening, Eduardo Priest, the head of Red Electrica operations.

And some areas of France suffered short -term interruptions on Monday.

The identification of the cause could take months

Spain is one of the largest producers of renewable energy in Europe, but until Monday has already sparked on this topic, some ask if the volatility of supplying solar or wind energy has made the energy systems more vulnerable to such a interruption, writes Reuters.

John Kemp, energy analyst and specialist in public policies, said that finding clear causes for the sequence of faults that contributed to the current could take the investigators for several months.

“The region has one of the largest penetrations in the world of renewable wind and solar energy generation, so that until the current will be a case study on the impact of renewable generators on reliability, as well as restart after a generalized failure,” he said.

Marc Ferracci, the French Minister of Industry, said on the RTL radio station that France is better prepared to prevent power outings such as the one suffered by Spain and Portugal and that the impact in France was “minimal”.

The Spanish operator rejects the hypothesis of a cyber attack

Pedro Sánchez warned that people should pay attention to misinformation on the whole crisis.

Yesterday, the regional president of Andalusia, Juanma Moreno, suggested that a cyber attack was the probable cause. But this hypothesis was quickly rejected by other officials close to the government, according to El Pais.

The preliminary evaluation of the Spanish electricity operator also excluded the variant of the cyber attack on Tuesday.

The State Meteorological Agency (AEMET) also stated that, during the current, “no unusual atmospheric or weather phenomena were detected, no sudden temperature variations, in the weather stations network.”

The specification came after some stories indicated that a meteorological phenomenon would have been possible to trigger the problem in the electrical network.