Spain’s High Court to investigate whether power outage was cyberattack
Spain’s High Court on Tuesday said it will open an investigation into Monday’s huge power outage to find out if a cyberattack against Spanish critical infrastructures may have caused the blackout in nearly all of the Iberian Peninsula.
If that were the case, Judge Jorge Calama would investigate it as a crime of terrorism, a court document showed.
Earlier, Spanish electricity grid operator REE REDE.MC said its preliminary assessment had ruled out cyberattack as the cause of the nationwide power outage.
Lights went off in most of the two countries at 12:33 p.m. (1033 GMT) on Monday in what was the worst blackout ever recorded in the Iberian Peninsula. Power supply only resumed in the evening.
REE’s System Operations Chief Eduardo Prieto told a news briefing the electricity system was hit by a dramatic power generation loss in southwestern Spain, that caused instability in the system that led to its disconnection from the French grid.
He said it was quite possible that the affected generation was solar, but it was too early to say for sure.
Prieto said the system was now stable and working normally.
John Kemp, an energy analyst and public policy specialist, said finding clear root causes for the sequence of failures that contributed to the blackout could take investigators several months.
