Holidaymakers in Spain were left fighting to escape the country after a mass blackout caused panic across the Iberian Peninsula. Spain and Portugal recovered almost all power on Tuesday morning, but not before thousands of train passengers were left stranded and millions were left with no phone signal or internet access. Over 200 flights were delayed or cancelled in airports including Madrid and Barcelona after the outages began at around 12:30pm on Monday, with terrified tourists “fighting” for taxis to the terminals.
British tourist Adrian Coles described the scenes of chaos as people “fought” to travel to Madrid Airport, telling MailOnline: “The streets are mostly at a standstill.” The country’s airports relied on backup electrical systems during the outage, which saw a steep drop in Spain’s electricity networks from 27,500MW to near 15,000MW. Around 99% of Spain’s power was restored on Tuesday, but Aena, the operator of 46 Spanish airports, warned of delays around the country.
Madrid mayor Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida advised the city’s residents to minimise travel and stay at home if possible in a video posted on X.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said a problem in the European grid had caused the huge outage, which also impacted parts of France. He said “all the potential causes” were being analysed.
He thanked the governments of France and Morocco, who were providing energy to restore power in northern and southern Spain.
Meanwhile, European Commission executive vice president of clean energy, Teresa Ribera, told reporters in Brussels that the blackout was “one of the most serious episodes recorded in Europe in recent times”.
Spain’s grid operator Red Electrica said the outage was caused by a “serious imbalance” between power generation and demand, leading experts to speculate that an increased reliance on renewable energy could make countries more vulnerable to such largescale disruption.
Energy consultant Kathryn Porter said: “The more you have wind and solar on the grid, the less stable the grid becomes and so the harder it is to manage faults.
“I would say there’s a strong chance that the large amount of solar on the system created the conditions for this to be a widespread blackout and made it much worse.”
At the time of the blackout, more than 60% of Spain’s power was reportedly coming from solar and wind sources.