It’s now been a week since that widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal left 50 million people without electricity.
Authorities in both countries say they still don’t know why the power failed, which is A) not reassuring and B) going to spur suspicious minds to conclude that authorities secretly do know why the power failed but don’t want to tell them. Those immediate insistent arguments that the blackout had nothing to do with reliance on renewable energy certainly seem to be driven more by political and reputation concerns than a thorough examination of the evidence.
New information about what happened is coming out in dribs and drabs, but it’s not shedding much more light on why it happened:
Spain’s high-voltage electricity grid suffered more power generation disruptions than previously known ahead of the country’s largest ever blackout, the government said.
“There is new information: there was a third loss of power generation” that occurred 19 seconds before the blackout and adds to two that were previously known, Environmental Transition Minister Sara Aagesen, the country’s top energy policymaker, said on Monday in an interview with broadcaster TVE. “We are seeking to identify the plants” where the generation collapsed and why this happened.
Until now, the government had said that the blackout on April 28 coincided with the loss of power generation in a plant in southwest Spain followed by a second loss of generation 1.5 seconds later in the same region.
The Spanish government and Red Eléctrica, which runs the transmission grid, have said, “Determining the cause requires sifting through large amounts of data and could take months.”
Authorities believe at least seven people died as a result of the blackout, and one estimate calculated it wiped out $454 million from the Spanish economy, as the outage interrupted the use of credit cards, online purchases, and withdrawals from cash machines.
If government authorities wonder why publics are growing less trusting and more suspicious of those in power, moments like this one are a good example. The consequences for Spain and Portugal were severe, and the authorities are shrugging their shoulders and saying the public will have to wait months for an explanation.