Spain's government blames huge blackout on grid regulator and private firms

The Spanish government has said that the national grid operator and private power generation companies were to blame for an energy blackout that caused widespread chaos in Spain and Portugal earlier this year.

Shortly after midday on 28 April, both countries were disconnected from the European electricity grid for several hours. Businesses, schools, universities, government buildings and transport hubs were all left without power and traffic light outages caused gridlocks.

While schoolchildren, students and workers were sent home for the day, many other people were stuck in lifts or stranded on trains in isolated rural areas.

In the immediate aftermath, the left-wing coalition government did not provide an explanation, instead calling for patience as it investigated.

Nearly two months after the unprecedented outage, the minister for ecological transition, Sara Aagesen, has presented a report on its causes.

She said the partly state-owned grid operator, Red Eléctrica, had miscalculated the power capacity needs for that day, explaining that the "system did not have enough dynamic voltage capacity".

Full story here Credit to: Guy Hedgecoe

BBC News in Madrid

Many Spaniards spent the night at stations waiting for the power to come back on