POWER RESTORED IN PORTUGAL, SOME OUTAGES REMAIN IN SPAIN.

Portugal Power Restored, Spain Still Faces Outages After Massive Iberian Blackout

Power supplies that were disrupted across Spain and Portugal on Monday morning began to be restored by the evening. By Tuesday morning, Portugal reported a full return of electricity, while parts of Spain were still experiencing outages stemming from the previous day's widespread disruption.

Portugal's grid operator REN announced early Tuesday that its electricity network had stabilized following the blackouts that affected much of the Iberian Peninsula, with all substations back online before midnight.

Spain's grid operator Red Electrica reported early Tuesday that it had managed to meet almost all of the country's electricity demand, although the system was still gradually recovering from Monday's nationwide blackout. All Spanish substations were operational by Tuesday morning, the company confirmed. "We continue to work from the electricity control center to ensure the complete normalization of the system," the company added.

In Spain, power began to return to parts of the Basque Country and Barcelona in the early hours of Tuesday, with some areas of the capital, Madrid, regaining electricity on Monday evening. According to the national grid operator, power had been restored to approximately 61 percent of consumers by Monday night.

Madrid's metro network announced the resumption of service at 8 a.m., with 80 percent of metro trains running. However, national railway infrastructure operator Adif reported that most national train lines were still not operating.

Electricity was also gradually restored in several Portuguese municipalities on Monday evening, including central Lisbon.

The extensive outage affected a significant portion of both countries, halting air traffic, stopping public transport, and forcing hospitals to suspend normal operations.

In a video posted overnight on social media platform X, Madrid Mayor Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida said that the city's street lighting had not been fully restored, advising people to stay home, adding: "It is important that emergency services can move around."

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Following the blackout, the Spanish Interior Ministry declared a national emergency, deploying 30,000 police officers across the country to maintain order, while the governments of both countries convened emergency cabinet meetings.

Outages of this scale are extremely rare in Europe.

British newspaper The Telegraph reported on Monday that the blackout affecting the Iberian Peninsula was the largest in European history, eclipsing the 2003 outage that left 56 million people in Italy and parts of Switzerland without power for up to 12 hours. The largest power outage in history occurred in India in 2012, when 700 million people, or about 10 percent of the world's population at the time, were left without electricity.

The cause of the blackout remains unclear, with Portugal suggesting the issue originated in Spain, and Spain pointing to a disconnection with France.

Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro said there was no indication that the power outage was caused by a cyberattack.

Nevertheless, rumors of possible sabotage circulated, and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said he had spoken with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.

Sanchez stated that the country lost 15 GW of electricity generation capacity in five seconds, equivalent to 60 percent of the national demand. He said technicians were working to determine why this sudden drop occurred. "This has never happened before," he noted.

Joao Conceicao, a board member of Portuguese grid operator REN, told reporters that the company was not ruling out a very large voltage fluctuation, initially in the Spanish system, which then spread to the Portuguese grid, as a possible cause. "There could be a thousand and one reasons, assessing the cause is premature," he said, adding that REN was in contact with its Spanish counterparts.

Spanish grid operator REE suggested that a disconnection with France may have indirectly triggered the outages.

"The extent of the power loss exceeded the limit foreseen for European systems and caused the disconnection of the Spanish and French electricity networks, which in turn led to the collapse of the Spanish electricity system," said Eduardo Prieto.

Earlier, a brief power outage had affected some regions of France. French grid operator RTE reported that it began supplying electricity to some parts of northern Spain after the blackout.