Cancun, Q.R. — A historic power outage in Spain and Portugal affected several flights into Cancun International. On Monday at 12:30 p.m. Spain time and 11:30 a.m. Portugal time, the Iberian Peninsula’s power grid suffered a widespread collapse.
Red Eléctrica de España (REE), Spain’s power distributor, registered a “national zero”, the name given to a widespread blackout, on their system Monday. According to authorities, it was a situation that had never occurred before.
The lack of electricity left a majority of the region paralyzed. While thousands were left stranded on public transportation, air traffic was also affected. On Monday, several flights at the Cancun International Airport were delayed due to the power collapse.
In Portugal, 96 flights were canceled with Lisbon Airport being the most affected. In Spain, 45 flights were cancelled at Barcelona and Madrid according to AENA (Aeropuertos Españoles y Navegación Aérea) data.
In Cancun, the massive blackout caused flight delays to and from the Cancun International Airport. According to information from ASUR, the airport’s managing company, one of their expected flights from Evelop Airlines was delayed four hours while others experienced delays of around one hour.
Thousands of travelers were left stranded in the massive power outage that continued into Tuesday. On Monday night, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez addressed the nation saying that after 11 hours without power, government experts were still trying to determine the official cause.
“We have never had a complete collapse of the system,” Sánchez said Monday. He said that at 12:33 p.m. Spain’s power grid lost 15 gigawatts or 60 percent of national demand in approximately five seconds.
Eduardo Prieto, head of REE, has called the power outage “exceptional and extraordinary.”
As of Tuesday morning, Spain had recovered approximately 92 percent of its power according REE. The Spanish prime minister said that the 48 million left in the dark would have lights by the end of the day.
Luis Montenegro, the Prime Minister of Portugal, said Monday during a news brief that his government has requested an independent audit of the power failure. “We want a full investigation of the outage’s causes.”
Since the outage, both Spain and Portugal have ruled out a cyber attack as the cause of the massive power failure. A cause for the power outage is leaning toward an “issue in the power transmission network” in Spain.
