Portugal’s REN denies claiming Iberian blackout caused by ‘rare atmospheric phenomenon’

Barely a corner of the peninsula, which has a joint population of almost 60 million people, escaped Monday’s power outage. No firm cause has yet emerged. ALSO READ: Spain’s power supply almost fully restored after one of EU’s worst blackouts.

‘REN confirms we did not put out this statement,’ spokesman Bruno Silva said, according to the AFP news agency.

The message in Portuguese circulating on social media had originally said that REN had blamed the weather and a ‘rare atmospheric phenomenon’.

‘Due to extreme temperature variations in inland Spain, abnormal oscillations were recorded in the very high-voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’,’ the message said, causing ‘anomalous oscillations’.

Spain’s national weather office (AEMET) said on Tuesday it had not detected any unusual meteorological or atmospheric phenomena on Monday and nor had there been any sudden temperature changes.

Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica has ruled out any ‘cybersecurity incident’ as a cause.

‘With the analysis that we have been able to carry out up to now, we can rule out a cybersecurity incident in the facilities’ of national grid operator Red Eléctrica, its director of operations Eduardo Prieto told a news conference.

‘There was no type of intrusion in Red Electrica’s control systems that may have caused the incident,’ he added.

After the authorities worked tirelessly during the night to restore power progressively across Spain, Prieto said the electric system had been ‘normalised’ and ‘working in a stable and correct way’.

Various possible causes are being reported across the Spanish, Portuguese and international media, while on social media rumours of a cyberattack from Russia, China, Israel or other nations are also being touted, without any evidence or proof.

According to a report in The Times, Adam Bell, a former official at the British Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, outlined a technical problem with the electricity grid that could explain the rapid loss of power.

The problem could involve the ‘system frequency’ of the grid, he said, which reflected the real-time balance between supply and demand. According to Bell, if these were not matched, the frequency would deviate from the standard that the system has been designed to work at. If demand was greater than supply, the frequency dropped. If supply was greater, the frequency rose.

If the frequency dropped too low, it indicated severe undersupply. Automatic systems were meant to start disconnecting parts of the grid, a process known as load shedding, to reduce demand. In August 2019, this kind of scenario led to a million people losing power across the east of England, he said.

‘Given the scale of the impact and the quickness with which everything switched off [in Spain and Portugal], it’s entirely possible that’s what’s happened here as well,’ Bell told Radio 4.

Meanwhile, Massimo Maoret, a professor of strategic management at IESE Business School in Madrid, suggested that Spain’s grid, one of the ‘most developed and reliable in the world’ must have been hit by ‘something extraordinary’.

Another theory held that the blackout might have been related to wind hitting high-tension transmission cables. 

Others have said that hotter temperatures could mean that electricity wires drooped between pylons, increasing the risk of them touching, know as a ‘flashover’ or ‘line-to-line fault’. It could cause power lines to melt or even vaporise, while circuit breakers tripped, cutting supplies in an area.

Spain’s socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has been pleading with people ‘not to speculate’ and avoid spreading ‘misinformation’ – although the lack of any verified explanation as to the causes of the outage could quickly become an issue for him.

Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the right-wing (PP) head of the Madrid region, has already criticised the central government over a lack of information. She called on the government to activate emergency plans and ‘allow the army to keep order, if necessary’.

ALSO READ: Power blackout affects 60 million people across Spain and Portugal.