[EuroNews] POSSIBLE GRID ISSUES
Onyema Nduka, a senior lecturer in power sustainability at the University of London, said that power networks are normally interconnected because the generation plants that power them are located far away from the cities.
That means that a power cut in one part of the grid could "lead to a cascading effect in other areas".
"Ideally, redundancies are built into the system, such as having multiple supply points, backup generators sited at different locations, interconnected wires and cables etc," he said.
The solution is for energy companies to restore electricity to the affected customers as soon as possible, but the procedure for completing this feat "has not yet been revealed," Nduka added.
Portuguese officials quoted by the AP and local media have so far blamed the outage on unspecified technical issues that stem from outside the country, but noted that the investigation is still ongoing.
CYBERATTACK RULED OUT BY SOME, NOT ALL
Juanma Moreno, president of the Andalusian regional government, said on Monday that a cyberattack has not been ruled out and advised citizens to be cautious.
However, the cyberattack claim has been refuted by officials, including Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s premier, Luis Montenegro, Portugal’s prime minister, and Antonio Costa, the president of the European Council.
"Spain has mechanisms to deal with these types of situations," Sanchez posted on social media platform X.
"Once again, I appeal to the public to cooperate with all authorities and act responsibly and civilly, as we have always done".
The Portuguese National Cybersecurity Centre also said in a statement that there was no indication the outage was due to a cyberattack.
In comments to Euronews, Taco Engelaar, managing director at energy infrastructure experts Neara, posited that the interconnectivity of the national grids and their systems would mean a fault or attack would have the same net result.
"Such a widespread grid failure is extremely unusual and could be caused by a number of things: there could be a physical fault in the grid which brings down power, a coordinated cyberattack could be behind it, or a dramatic imbalance between demand and supply has tipped the grid system over the edge," he said.
"If it's a system fault, then the interconnectivity between different regional and national grids could be leading to the large footprint of outages we're seeing today [Monday]," he added.
"The same goes for a cyberattack - lots of these systems are connected and share assets - taking down one could take down many".
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