Electricity is out across Iberia
• Trains, metros and trams stand idle.
• Portugal claims it could take up to a week to fix the problem. Spain claims it might take 6 to 10 hours.
• European Commission says no signs of cyberattack.
• Portuguese national electric company REM says outage precipitated by extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain causing anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 KV), a phenomenon known as 'induced atmospheric vibration'".
• Cashless system crumbles in shops, restaurants and gas stations as card terminals run out of battery. People are queuing at ATMs to take out real money.
• Flights disrupted.
Live threads:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/4/28/live-spain-and-portugal-hit-by-huge-power-outage-cause-unknownhttps://www.bbc.com/news/live/c9wpq8xrvd9tChaos in suburban store as cashiers switch from card to cash-only payments
I have been speaking to Cara McGoogan, who is in the Carcavelos suburb of Lisbon and tells me that there has been a run on local grocery stores.
Supermarkets have shut as their doors all run on electricity and are heavily air conditioned.
"The local grocery store is still open, but it's really full," Cara says, describing a chaotic situation with the store quickly switching to cash as card payments stopped working. Cashiers were using the calculator on their phones to figure out what change to give, she says.
Cara, who is currently on holiday in the Portuguese capital, adds that they managed to buy some canned goods and vegetables and also bought some candles and battery-powered lights and torches.
All electricity has gone, she says, including power to fridges and freezers. They luckily have a gas-powered barbecue, so friends and neighbours are coming over tonight with all their perishables and they plan on cooking everything.
The blackout started around 11:50 local time (10:50 BST), Cara adds, and while phones were initially fine, the 5G networks are only working intermittently now and the lines went down fully for some time as well.
>>2245359>what has the mood been like? Confusion at first, but most people have been rather calm at least in my town, in busy cities i bet not so much
>are people mad the government? They are constantly mad, months ago there were the DANA floods in Valencia and they wrecked the president's car i hope they dont miss this time
>were you at any point fully cut off from the world?Yeah, electricity out everywhere. I was just laying on my bed and suddenly had no wifi, i thought the issue was with my phone but then my mother came and told me shit was out in the entire city. Then i went to neighbours and yeah there was no electricity. I went to the chinese corner shop to buy batteries for the radio and it was all dark, poor guy had to do the price calculations in his head lol. The radio confirmed it was out in the whole peninsula and they were rumors it was in the entire Europe, turned out that was fake news though
i thought it was gonna be out for a couple days, people were rumoring that so went buying to the supermarket canned food and stuff, biggest downside has been eating cold food cause no microwave. On my way i encountered a classmate and poor girl her parents usually come pick her up but now had no way to communicate, anyway she was with a friend so all good
Other than that i've just been chilling playing guitar and hearing the radio until it came back like half an hour ago
the Canary and Balearic islands have not been affected, they have a separate electric thingy
It seems most issues are with transport, 20 something trains have gotten stuck in the middle of nowhere. Also traffic lights are off and some citizens have put on a yellow vest and manage the traffic themselves, not enough police
the emergency number is/was the only working phone line and apparently has been over used
>>2245433wut
>>2245394do most people in spain no longer have a gas stove?
i've thought about buying an induction stove but i always remember how it wouldn't work in a blackout. then again i'm not sure how reliable the gas supply would be either
They are restoring it little by little, i guess firstly in smaller less demanding cities, Madrid is still all out as well as most of Barcelona. Also apparently getting help from moroccan and french bros
>>2245442most modern homes no, i have one in my village though
>i've thought about buying an induction stove but i always remember how it wouldn't work in a blackout. then again i'm not sure how reliable the gas supply would be eithera gas cylinder is very durable, by the time it runs out it's already apocalypse territory so you'd have bigger concerns
With no clear timeline for full restoration, people in Portugal aren't pleased
With the metro system still shut here, bus stops are overwhelmed.
Phone networks are patchy, with some residents unable to connect at all. Supermarkets are seeing extremely long queues, with card payments down and many shoppers panic-buying essentials - echoing scenes from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Businesses across the city, as well as official judicial institutions like the courts, have closed their doors.
Portugal’s main broadcaster has also struggled to stay on air, facing technical issues as backup generators fail to provide consistent power.
Reaction from the news that it could take Spain six to eight hours to return to normal, and Portugal a week, has left some feeling unimpressed and frustrated. Others are not pleased that some Spanish cities have reportedly got electricity back while Portugal is still grappling with the outage.
The power cut has thrown Lisbon into total disruption, with no clear timeline yet for full restoration.
<seems portugal is faring worse than spain
>>2245543 (meant for)
Extreme swings damage grid infrastructure.
I remember just a few days ago some were cheering because renewables were 100% of the (Spanish) electricity supply for 24 hours.
A connection with France got cooked, resulting in the grid having to go into emergency shutdown.
Why else do you think it's taking so long to turn the power back on? A ton of fossil fuel power plants were shut down in recent years which can provide rapid capacity in case of shortages, or otherwise balance the grid.
There's still some gas plants, but solar/wind are approaching 50% of the electricity mix.
>>2245577weirdest shit is i live near the border and we are among the first to have it back, do they use a whole different grid or something? borders are so retarded
do it bros
>>2245569France near the border i think it was but for less than an hour at most afaik
>>2245592so is nuclear energy the way?
>>2245577>actual favorable conditions for revolutionwhy do you think so?
>>2245592>A connection with France got cooked, resulting in the grid having to go into emergency shutdown.provide proof
>>2245618>>2245610yeah protugal is pretty bad, their minimum wage is shit, spain's minimum wage is closer to France's than to portugal and we have portuguese immigrants. I visit portugal every now and then and it's like a balkan country while we're more like a visegrad country. Either way spain outside of Madrid and catalonia/basque country is not much different
people have this delusion that every single european is le evil opressor but its mostly the Brussels elites and their allocates
>>2245618i heard their communist party is pretty big, i've seen Avante posters on the street when i've gone and get teared up a bit, our com party is complete rubbish
>>2245613Nuclear isn't suited to load balancing . Maybe you could get away with it by simply using up the energy in other ways during low demand. By pumping around water or electrolyzing it. Making synthetic fuels, or maybe convert the surplus into radio waves and simply beam it out into space. But that's extremely wasteful. Considering the usual gap between peak and base load.
Having high intermittency sources make up most of the grid with minimum load balancing capacity is really really dumb, and this was bound to happen eventually. And they can't simply flip a switch either, because the grid would either suffer brown outs, or infrastructure would literally combust and melt by tomorrow noon.
>>2245803boring, stale and 4chan tier
have some decency
'Technical issue' between France and Spain's energy connection
The trade body that represents the power industry in Europe tells BBC's The World Tonight a problem occurred with the energy connection between France and Spain earlier today.
Kristian Ruby, the general secretary of EURELECTRIC, also describes the outage as a "50 year, if not 100 year incident….something very very rare "
Ruby tells BBC's World Tonight they are aware of a "specific incident with an interconnector between France and Spain".
The general secretary says: "There was a specific technical issue that arose there and hence the Spanish grid was disconnected from the broader European grid earlier today.
"Now, judging from that situation alone, you wouldn't think that would cause a power cut across the entire Iberian peninsula, so my assessment is there is likely to have been other elements in this equation that have caused this situation," he adds.
Half of Spain's power restored, PM says
We're getting some new details now from Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez
He says around half the country has now had their power restored - with the rest due to be restored by tomorrow.
As for any cause, Sanchez explains the authorities have not yet established why the outage occurred.
"Citizens can and should be calm," he says. "We have a clear goal and is to get power fully restored by tomorrow."
He adds that schools will remain open tomorrow but that in some cases there won't be classes or exams.
"A long night lies ahead; we will continue working to restore normality as soon as possible," he concludes.
Extra police deployed to maintain public order and prevent looting
Spain's Interior Ministry has been reinforcing police patrols across the country by deploying 30,000 officers to maintain public order and prevent security incidents, particularly on roads where traffic signals are not working.
“Citizens can and should remain calm,” Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said during his latest address.
In many towns and cities, plain clothed officers are being used to prevent looting and protect businesses, many of which are unable to lower their electric shutters due to the power outage.
In Catalonia, the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan Police) will deploy more than 7,000 officers overnight to respond to emergencies and maintain public order.
>>2245974basically this,
1. It started fighting a decolonial war in the 70s (Spain and Portugal were retarded in that they held out for their african colonies and then leave them fare by themselves unlike brits and french who granted them independence but keep shadow-colonizing them)
2. the Polisario Front is formed as a national liberation movement and had communist sympathies
3. Franco dies and Spain pussies out to the UN and hands them over to whoever wants them (aka Morocco, which at this point is a solid western ally against non-aligned and merely pro-soviet Algeria. Also this way they avoid an Angola situation were a war breaks out and a communist/hostile movement could have taken power)
4. Morocco astroturfs a movement to annex the territory (aka colonize)
5. War breaks out, shit gets dragged out and they don't fully integrate it
6. To this day 2/3s of the country is occupied by morocco and keeps settling people there while blocking attempts to saharawi self-determination that even the international community has pushed (or more like suggested). Polisario-controlled territory is a non-entity internationally, many saharawis are effectively non-citizens and refugee camps still exist
doesn't help that the most populated city is right next to the moroccan border and that the whole country is a huge desert with nothing in it, if they found oil it'd make for nice beaches though
>>2246076Gardenbros how is this thing that a vassal state can colonize other nation
???1!I'm shaking and criying right now
>>2245394While the PSOE is without a doubt utter shit i'm somewhat worried that VOX cunts will take advantage of this and push their dumbass agenda on Spain, living on Argentina has shown me how much cancerous those kind of right wing buffoons can be, is it true that the media in Europe is trying to show our local shitshow as some kind of economic miracle? that sounds completely unbelievable to me but in this current state of things everything goes i guess.
I also see many of my countrymen saying stuff like "uncontrolled muslim immigration is ruining Spain >:(" and all sort of disgusting racist shit and i'm like, bitch, haven't you seen Forocoches? you're just some Panchito/Tiraflechas/Machupichu/Sudaca, don't go on saying that kind of stuff
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