Spain-Portugal power outage live: Blackouts cause transport chaos across both countries as millions left without electricity – UK Times

Ukraine has offered Spain and Portugal a helping hand in restoring its energy networks as blackouts have it swathes of the countries.

Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galuschenko said on Monday: “We are ready to share the knowledge and experience, including those gained during the systematic Russian attacks on the energy infrastructure.”

Spanish electricity transmission operator Red Electrica said the cause of the outage was not immediately known.

The 15th seed Grigor Dimitrov and his British opponent Jacob Fearnleyhad to leave the court as scoreboards went dark and overhead cameras lost power. The round-of-32 match at the Manolo Santana Stadium – where Dimitrov led Fearnley 6-4, 5-4 – had to be stopped due to a spidercam being left hanging too close to the court.

Senior Sports Writer & Deputy Editor Lawrence Ostlere reports:

Travel Correspondent Simon Calder reports…

The aviation analytics firm Cirium says over 500 flights were due to operate from UK airports to Spain and Portugal today, representing nearly 100,000 seats. While there was no complete closure like Heathrow last month when a power cut happened, the effect has been devastating.

At Lisbon, TAP Portugal has cancelled dozens of flights in and out of the Portuguese capital. British Airways has grounded at least one round trip from London Heathrow, while EasyJet has cancelled flights to and from Bristol.

Madrid is also badly affected, with many cancellations particularly of flights with Spain and to/from Portugal. If power is not fully restored quickly, later on tonight there could be problems with the normal overnight departures from born Madrid and Lisbon to Latin America, on which thousands of passengers are booked.

At Barcelona, delays of one to two hours are the order of the day for international flights, such as Ryanair to London Stansted, while many domestic flights are grounded.

The key holiday airports of Alicante and Malaga in Spain, and Faro in Portugal, do not to be badly affected. The Balearic Islands and Canary Islands are seeing only cancellations of domestic flights, as is Madeira and the Azores.

Spain’s public broadcaster RTVE said a major power outage hit several regions of the country at around 12:30 pm local time, leaving its newsroom in the dark.

While the cause of the shutdown is still not clear, the impact on travellers is all too evident. The Spanish national rail company, Renfe, announced that at 12.30pm power to its network had been cut, halting trains and throwing stations into chaos – with, understandably, no departures.

To give you an idea of the scale of this, Spain has by far the most extensive high-speed rail network in Europe, with dozens of trains each hour on the busiest route from Madrid to Barcelona – which, I understand, came to a halt at various locations on the fast lines. Travellers to and from Alicante, Valencia, Seville and Malaga are also affected.

In both Madrid and Barcelona, and as far as I can see Lisbon and Porto, the Metro networks were halted – with passengers trapped on trains and in stations underground.

Anyone who decided to take a taxi instead will have found gridlock as traffic lights failed.

A graph on Spain’s electricity network website showing demand across the country indicated a steep drop around 12:15 p.m. from 27,500MW to near 15,000MW.

Travel correspondent Simon Calder reports:

Ryanair has delayed at least one Madrid-UK flight by two hours. The airline is telling passengers:

“Potential disruption to/from mainland Spain and Portugal due to general power outage (Mon 28 Apr).

“Due to a general power outage affecting mainland Spain and Portugal today Mon 28 April, we are monitoring potential disruption to flights operating to/from all airports in mainland Spain and Portugal.

“We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused as a result of this power outage, which is outside of our control.”

Madrid’s mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida has warned residents to keep put as the city has been affected by a power outage.

“I ask all residents of Madrid to keep their movements to an absolute minimum and, if at all possible, to remain where they are. We want to keep all roads clear,” he said in a video posted on social media.

The mayor also asked residents to only call emergency services if it is “truly urgent.”

“If emergency calls go unanswered, go to the police and the fire stations in person, where they will try to deal with all the emergencies which may present themselves.”

Spain’s electricity grid operator Red Electrica has confirmed power outages across the country and said “all resources are being dedicated to solving it”.