At 12:30 p.m. Local time on Monday, power was extinguished. Through Spain and the trains of Portugal, planes and traffic lights have suddenly ceased to work.
Reports have emerged from People are stuck in elevatorsAnd Google Maps Live Data showed traffic jams in major cities, notably Madrid and Barcelona, while they took place. The main airports have warned passengers from delays due to the power failure. His cause is still unknown. It is estimated that the power failure would have affected all of Portugal and Spain and small regions in France.
“The traffic lights do not work. The streets are chaotic because there is an officer with each crossing, ”explains Gustavo, who lives in Madrid. “Water does not reach apartments at the top of the buildings because the pumps are electric, and the very some open stores only take money.”
This is the nightmarish scenario of each electrician engineer, explains Paul Cuff, assistant professor of the electrical and electronic engineering school at the University College Dublin. “The reason why we do not have widespread breakdowns all the time is that the system operators are very conservative and very proactive to use major safety margins to ensure that this does not happen,” he said. Engineers provide failures in networks or overvoltages of consumer demand that could destabilize power supply. “These things are unusual, but for an electric engineer, the latent threat of that happens is still there.”
The Spanish electricity operator Red Eléctrica said in a post on x A few hours after the initial breakdown, he had recovered power in certain regions of Cataluña and Aragón to the northeast; País Vasco, Galice, La Rioja, Asturias, Navarra and Castilla y Léon in the north; Extremeradura to the east; and Andalucía in the south.
Experts believe that the grid in service in the two countries could take between a few hours to several days, depending on the region. While the network is approaching, the emergency services will probably be hierarchical about things like a stable internet connection, they say.
There is a sequence of well repeated not that occurs, explains Cuffe. They will do what is called a “black start” – a process that gradually reconnects the power plants to form a functional grid again. Electric supply and demand must be balanced to avoid other power outages, which means that power plants are online, only parts of the network can be online with them, with the country gradually UP, step by step. There should be a team within the grid operator who provides this and who identified the generators to bring online first, he explains.
“You should anticipate each failure that can occur and you have to survive one of them,” says Cuffe. From the control room, engineers should be able to say which parts of the grid work permanently so that they do not fly blind, but it will always take time.
“Even with a completely healthy grid, doing this black start could take 12 hours or 16 hours. You have to do it sequentially, and it takes a long time. I am sure that there are engineers in vans grouped everywhere while we are talking about trying to make it all happen.
