Spain: The island of La Palma in the Canary Islands deprived of electricity

Just six weeks after a massive blackout affected the entire Iberian Peninsula, the Spanish island of La Palma, part of the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa, faced its own power outage lasting nearly three hours on Tuesday.

This outage, while significantly shorter than the extensive blackout on April 28, impacted around 82,000 residents of La Palma.

At 5:32 PM Canary time (4:32 PM GMT), the energy company Endesa announced a total power failure, leaving all users connected to the island's network without electricity.

Emergency services quickly activated the Canary Islands' emergency plan in response to the energy alert on this tourist island. However, by early evening, the situation was resolved, with Endesa restoring 100% of the island's power supply within three hours, confirming the restoration just after 7:30 PM GMT.

Endesa's territorial director for the Canary Islands, Pablo Casado, stated that they are currently analyzing all records to accurately reconstruct the sequence of events and determine the cause of the incident. The company expressed its regret for the inconvenience caused and reaffirmed its commitment to quality, safety, supply continuity, and transparency in the event of incidents.

Meanwhile, Spain's electrical network operator, REE, stated on social media that it was not responsible for this outage, denying claims that it originated from the REE substation in Los Guinchos, contradicting information attributed to Endesa by local emergency services.

Recent Outages

According to local newspaper ElTime, this outage followed similar incidents in recent weeks on La Palma, although none had affected the entire island.

The earlier massive blackout on April 28 had left all of Portugal and Spain without power for many hours, sparing the Canary Islands. This blackout resulted in a loss of around 60% of Spain's electricity consumption—equating to 15 gigawatts—within seconds.

Authorities reported two significant electrical fluctuations detected 30 minutes before the outage, followed by three separate incidents at Spanish substations in Granada, Badajoz, and Seville within 20 seconds.

Traffic lights, ATMs, public transportation, and telecommunications were all paralyzed across Spain until power was restored by early evening or night in most areas of the peninsula.

Several hypotheses were considered to explain the earlier blackout, including a cyberattack, which has since been ruled out, and a network failure caused by excess solar energy production.

Investigations have been launched by the competition authority, the Ministry of Ecological Transition in Spain, and the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (Entso-E). Additionally, a judicial investigation concerning potential "cyber sabotage" has also been initiated.