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00:00Next, Spain, beginning the investigation to the causes of the blackout
00:04that disrupted millions of lives across the Iberian Peninsula.
00:07A court is examining potential sabotage of critical infrastructure.
00:11Meanwhile, a tragedy has emerged.
00:13Amid the blackout, three elderly people died from suspected carbon monoxide poisoning
00:18after using a generator to power an oxygen machine.
00:21As authorities in Spain and Portugal work to get the whole of the Iberian Peninsula
00:30reconnected to the power grid, questions are being asked
00:33what caused the two countries to suddenly go offline.
00:36A massive outage hit at around lunchtime on Monday,
00:40plunging businesses and transport networks into chaos.
00:44En lo que respecta a las causas, about the cause,
00:48what the red electric technicians are telling us
00:50is that at 12.33 this afternoon,
00:5415 gigawatts of generation were suddenly lost from the system
00:57and that they were lost in just five seconds.
01:01This is something that has never happened before.
01:07It is still not known what caused the sudden drop in power supply,
01:11which was equal to about 60% of Spain's needs at the time.
01:15Authorities in Portugal blamed it on a rare atmospheric phenomenon,
01:18while some in Spain speculated on a rapid rise in temperature of five degrees
01:23shortly before the outage.
01:25Spain's electrical provider, Red Electrica, said a very strong oscillation in the network
01:30had cut off Spain's grid from the rest of continental Europe,
01:33leading to the system's collapse.
01:35Getting both countries back online was a gradual process because of the risk of overloading the network yet again.
01:42Spain was able to call on France and Morocco to supply emergency power to reboot its own networks,
01:47but Portugal was forced to do so on its own.
01:50The episode underlines deficiencies in Spain's power grid,
01:54which is relatively isolated from the rest of Europe,
01:57and the country's shift to renewable energy sources,
02:00which now supply 56% of its electricity,
02:03has not been fully matched by upgrades to system management.
02:06Let's get the analysis of bringing in Sophie Urabassianu,
02:11who is an energy and base oil expert at the ICIS in London.
02:15Sophie, thanks for being with us.
02:17I'd be interested in hearing from you what your theory is about this outage.
02:21Do you have any insight you can share with us here at France 24?
02:26Well, I can't speculate on the causes because no official cause has been set yet.
02:31There's still an investigation that's going on.
02:33But what I can say is that it has been a colossal blackout.
02:37It plunged Spain into darkness,
02:39and the impact was strongest in transport, in health, in communications,
02:43but also in the chemicals and energy sectors.
02:46And obviously, we've had a similar situation in Portugal,
02:49and that's because those two systems were synchronized.
02:52In a way, those electricity interconnectors do not stop at the national borderlines.
02:57We had power flows with France reversing to support that Spanish grid.
03:00And I guess one of the strongest impacts was the fact that we've had various refineries
03:07that had to be shut down as an emergency protocol kicked in.
03:11This is quite an amazing story, isn't it, in many ways, Sophie?
03:15And people are wondering whether, you know, if it's Spain, Portugal today,
03:19well, who might it be tomorrow?
03:21Is there a possibility that a similar issue could affect other countries across Europe
03:26at any particular time?
03:27Again, it depends on the cause.
03:31Now, obviously, I have seen statements from the head of Spain who said, you know,
03:37there's still an investigation happening.
03:40Now, a theory has been discounted.
03:43So it could have been a cyber attack.
03:44It could have been a combination of factors.
03:47What is clear is the fact that there is that vulnerability in the transmission grids,
03:54especially when there is a lot of renewable generation there.
03:59Yesterday evening, the systems were able to be brought back online due to the gas fire generation.
04:06So a lot of that was used.
04:08In fact, for today, the forecast showed that the demand for gas for power plants was going
04:15to be more than double what it normally is in order to bring that system back to a regular level.
04:24And it just shows that how dependent our society has become on electricity.
04:30You know, the impact is going to take a few days.
04:32There are some plants out there, some units that were shut down in an emergency stage.
04:36And it's going to take a few days to get them back and get all that capacity back up to full.
04:44Once upon a time, Sophie, we did things in a manual way.
04:48We looked things up.
04:49We sifted through, I don't know, a pamphlet or a book to find out a fact or find out the time of a train, for instance.
04:55But now, of course, we do it all electronically.
04:58And those kind of things, of course, all crashing as a consequence or a knock-on effect of what we're talking about.
05:04You mentioned about renewables, regenerated energy.
05:08Am I hearing that the green factor could be a problem?
05:14Not necessarily a problem.
05:16But obviously, we are dependent on electricity to be produced when the sun is shining or when the wind is blowing.
05:24So obviously, if you have a large part of the energy mist, like basically that's what we have in Spain right now,
05:31then this does expose the grid to the issues, right?
05:38If you need to have a stream of baseload, electricity produced, that needs to come from a nuclear power plant or from a gas fire power plant.
05:47And in the Iberic Peninsula, a lot of that is renewable.
05:52Obviously, there is a sustainable aspect of it.
05:55It is cleaner.
05:56It is greener.
05:57So there is a good part of it.
05:59But obviously, this sort of also kind of sheds light on the fact that we do need to have some reserves in there.
06:06We do need to have that baseload capacity available for when issues like this happen in the future.
06:12Should the structure of the network be changed, Sophie?
06:17Obviously, it is a strong point that we can all supply energy from country to country.
06:23But it seems here that that might have been a bit of a problem that things didn't stop at borders in some way, shape or form.
06:29I don't mean to sound sort of retrograde in saying this, but, you know,
06:32would it be more sensible to break down this kind of big pan-European structure and maybe be more national?
06:37The issues with that is that that would increase the cost of electricity,
06:44because what we have at the moment with such an, let's say, an integrated transmission grid throughout most European countries,
06:51it means that electricity can be exchanged.
06:54And in a way, it sort of helps to reduce price volatility on the wholesale market,
06:58which ultimately reduces that end consumer price.
07:01So if we were to remove, or let's say, this interconnectivity, we put barriers in,
07:08then overall, that would probably, I would say, that would even make the situation worse,
07:12because if there is a price volatility that's exposed in Greece, you know, there is no way to kind of temper that.
07:21There is no way to kind of bring electricity from other countries like Italy.
07:24I can hear what you're saying.
07:25And, of course, there was a thanks to Morocco, wasn't there, from the Spanish prime minister,
07:30for Morocco's help in getting Spain back up.
07:34Yes, it's true.
07:35I mean, we did have the French CSO also coming in,
07:39and basically they were supporting the Spanish CSO in bringing back everything.
07:44Now, normally, what's interesting is the fact that Spain is a net exporter,
07:50which is really interesting.
07:51In this case, obviously, it had to reverse the flows.
07:55It's quite interlinked with Portugal, as I mentioned.
07:59And if you look at Europe, the electricity markets, the gas markets, they're interconnected.
08:05That's why, you know, we have reactions in terms of price.
08:09We have reactions in terms of capacity everywhere.
08:12In a way, France was there to kind of, you know, pick things up,
08:16and they do benefit of a lot of nuclear capacity there as well.
08:19So that's baseload capacity.
08:20Sophie, thank you very much indeed for giving us a breakdown of a number of things.
08:26Of course, it's all subject to basically what happens next, isn't it, in terms of the inquiry.
08:30But at least you've been through a number of possible scenarios for us
08:34and given us some real insight.
08:35Sophie Udu-Bassianu, energy and base oil market expert at ICIS in London.
08:43Thank you, Sophie, for joining us here on France 24.
08:45We appreciate your time.