Spain and Portugal on Monday went offline due to nationwide power fluctuations that spurred outages, impacting the entire Iberian Peninsula, its connection to the power grid in southwestern France, and Andorra in the Pyrenees mountains along the border between France and Spain.
The outages led to stoppages in traffic signals, halts to railway transit, the shutdown of information networks and hindering of medical center operations and ATM access. The Spanish government announced a state of emergency and launched its national security council emergency handling mechanism. The EU stated that the outage was the most serious European infrastructure crisis in the past year.
The outages are not just an event revolving around energy sources — they further reveal the structural weakness of Europe’s power grids under extreme climate conditions. Spain’s national power providers said that the outages were due to extreme fluctuations in the European power grid.
In one of these fluctuations, electricity generation equivalent to 60 percent of national demand dropped in five seconds, leading to cascading blackouts. Although the Iberian power grid is connected internationally with Morocco and France, and despite neighboring countries providing emergency power through auxiliary power supply networks, when the electricity provision network faced system failure, these connections were not enough to have an immediate effect.
Although Spain and Portugal are capable of fending off attacks and digital compromise by foreign actors, they launched a “potential terrorist attack” mechanism to conduct a criminal investigation, reflecting the need for contemporary homeland security to face off against the dual risk of physical destruction and data intrusions.
Spain’s and Portugal’s power grid failures are a pressure test for other countries’ contingency mechanisms and multinational coordination capabilities. Madrid immediately launched a contingency, starting with coordinating with police to maintain public order. The Spanish and Portuguese prime ministers activated a leadership hotline to coordinate with France, Germany and Italy to receive power grid technology support.
Meanwhile, both countries prioritized restoring electricity to medical centers and transit hubs. Spain’s military coordinated the mobilization of portable generators and vehicles to support airport and railway infrastructure, ensuring national basic infrastructure services were not fully knocked out.
During the blackouts, people flooded into stores to buy daily necessities, including flashlights and other emergency light sources, short-wave radios and other basic necessities. The latter demonstrates Spain’s high degree of insecurity concerning being cut off from basic information and echoes the EU’s late-March proposal to stock up on 72 months’ worth of strategic goods and materials.
We should not consider what happened in Spain and Portugal to be a black swan event, but rather a dress rehearsal in light of global climate extremes, and power grid and network connections.
Moreover, since Taiwan is an island with no multinational power grid support and no energy source backups, when we face threats from potential hostile military and digital threats, our risks are enormous. These risks show the importance of bolstering the defensive resilience of our power grid, as well as emplacing systems for risk rehearsals and evaluating compound disasters, such as compounded climate extremes, and disconnection from information and communications systems.
Tsai Yu-ming is an assistant professor in the School of Liberal Education at Shih Chien University.
Translated by Tim Smith
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