Massive power outage: What does the state of emergency declared in Spain mean?

The causes of this incident are "still under investigation." Millions of people were left without power around 12:33 p.m. on Monday, April 28, in Spain, Portugal, and for several minutes in the Basque Country in France, due to a major power outage.

This outage severely disrupted communications, airports, and rail networks in Spain and Portugal. According to the Spanish national railway company, rail traffic, including the metro, was completely suspended early yesterday afternoon. Traffic lights and shopping malls were also affected, and hospitals even had to suspend some of their operations.

State of emergency declared

On Monday evening, the Spanish Interior Ministry declared a state of emergency following the widespread blackout. According to Reuters, this measure only applied to regions that requested it. Last night, Madrid, Andalusia, and Extremadura requested central government intervention to ensure the maintenance of public order and the management of certain essential functions.

The state of emergency is provided for in Article 116 of the Spanish Constitution of 1978, along with other provisions to deal with extreme situations, namely the state of exception and the state of siege. “The state of emergency will be proclaimed by the government with the prior authorization of the Congress of Deputies, it may not exceed thirty days, subject to extension for a further period of thirty days, with the same requirements,” states the Council of Europe website .

35% of the network restored in the country at 10 p.m.

“We went for a walk in the late morning and when we got back to the hotel, the lights were out and the elevators weren't working,” explains Andrée, a retiree from Normandy currently traveling to Torremolinos in Andalusia. “At lunch, the hotel staff warned us that there would be no hot food because of the outage. They couldn't even do the dishes because we didn't have any water at the hotel either. Everything returned to normal around 7 p.m.,” she continues.

By evening, power was gradually returning to both countries. By 10 p.m., the Spanish grid operator REE announced that electricity was gradually being restored to several neighborhoods in Madrid, with 35 percent of supply restored across mainland Spain.

60% of demand lost in five seconds

At around 6 a.m. on Tuesday, 99.16 percent of the country's electricity supply was secure, with 21.26 megawatts (MW) of electricity generated. At a press conference, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said that "15 gigawatts" of electricity had been "suddenly lost" from the country's grid "in just five seconds," noting that "fifteen gigawatts correspond to approximately 60 percent of the demand" for electricity in Spain at that time of day.

His Portuguese counterpart, Luis Montenegro, spoke of a "serious and unprecedented situation" whose origins are "probably to be found in Spain." Pedro Sánchez said on Monday that he had no "conclusive information" regarding the causes of the massive power outage affecting the entire Iberian Peninsula, adding that "no hypothesis" had been ruled out for the time being.