The worst failure in 20 years has occurred. 19 billion PLN in losses

• The Iberian blackout is the biggest electricity crisis in the EU in over 20 years.
• The failure could cost Spain and Portugal between EUR 0.49 billion and EUR 4.5 billion (approximately PLN 19 billion).
• The outage experienced by Spain and Portugal is likely to intensify the debate around network security.

On April 28 , Spain and Portugal experienced a blackout . The power outage paralyzed traffic, grounded planes, stopped trains, and trapped many people in elevators and subway cars. Hospitals were operating in emergency mode. Electricity supplies stabilized on April 29, but the effects of the blackout were felt in the following days.

As the Polish Economic Institute notes, the blackout affected 55 million people. As a result of the grid failure, over 15 GW of power was lost from the Spanish power system within 5 seconds. The power failure also temporarily affected the French Basque Country.

Such large-scale power failures have so far been extremely rare in the EU, and only the failure in Italy in 2003 had a scale larger than last week's on the Iberian Peninsula. It is also the largest blackout of this type in the world since 2012, when 700 million people in India were left without power for over 13 hours - we read.

According to PIE, initial estimates of the costs of the blackout for the Spanish and Portuguese economies differ significantly:

• the failure could cost these countries from EUR 0.49 billion to EUR 4.5 billion (approximately PLN 20 billion);
• The blackout was particularly severe for the meat industry, which could have cost it EUR 190 million.

The exact cause of the outage is unknown. It is being investigated by, among others, the European Network of Transmission System Operators (ENTSO-E) and a Spanish government commission. REE, the Spanish transmission system operator, has narrowed down the source of the outage to two incidents of loss of generation at substations in southwestern Spain.

European Commission Vice-President Teresa Ribera said the blackout would prompt Europe to draw conclusions about the need for energy storage and investment in energy networks, while warning against jumping to conclusions about the exact causes.

The outage experienced by Spain and Portugal is likely to intensify the discussion around network security, an inherent element of which is the flexibility and stability of the system, PIE reports.

With the growing role of renewable energy sources in European energy mixes, there is a growing need for stabilisation through energy storage or a controllable, low-emission source with greater inertia, such as nuclear energy.