Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Monday provided an update as to what caused the power grid in the nation of 44 million as well as neighboring Portugal to completely collapse earlier in the day: No clue and even less about how long it would take to come back online, per Politico EU.
Luckily for approximately 92 percent of folks in Spain at least that indefinite target was on the low end and electricity has been restored Tuesday morning, though officials are pleading with Spaniards to avoid public transportation and limit cell phone use to just short calls. Getting to the bottom of what happened may take significantly longer and to say it was freaking weird that 15 gigawatts – or 60 percent of national consumption typical for the time of day/week/year – suddenly disappeared from the grid for five seconds, causing the rapid collapse across the two neighboring countries.
Portuguese operator REN claimed that “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network,” which is some freaking weird shit. Whoever heard of that?