Portugal plunged into chaos over power outage

The rumour mill went into overdrive on Monday after Portugal was thrown into chaos yesterday morning, the blame appointed to everything from a Russian-backed cyber attack, a rare atmospheric phenomenon over central Spain, to oscillations in power demand and supply that proved to much for the grid system.

I sat patiently at an outpatients department of Hospital Curry Cabral in Lisbon when the lights went out just after 11.30am.

The receptionist frantically tapped the keys on her computer and said “I can’t bring up appointments or patients’ notes” and told everyone to wait.

No one was the wiser, not even the doctors who emerged from their surgery offices into the reception area and eventually told patients: “We’ll have to cancel today’s appointments and you’ll be notified of a new date. We don’t know when, but you’ll be informed.”

Making my way back home, people were gathered in the streets. One man waiting at the pedestrian crossing whose lights were not working on Lisbon’s busy thoroughfare Avenida 5 de Outubro, turned to another and said “It’s the Russians’ fault, World War III has begun.”

In a shoe shop in Praça de Londres where I went to pick up a pair of moccasins, but managed to pay by mobile card machine, a woman confidently told me it was “all part of a plan, like Covid-19”, to downgrade the Euro currency because of a new sovereign debt crisis.

My partner had had the foresight two weeks ago to buy several five-gallon water containers, a radio and three torches with batteries after the authorities had issued advice that people should have these and a first aid kit at home for any eventuality.

Suddenly the vulnerability and fragility of human dependence on power, IT, and food distribution chains came into sharp focus.

Meanwhile, later that day on TV, a former energy and industry minister Luís Mira Amaral was banging on about the ridiculous policy of decommissioning all Portugal’s coal-fired power stations and being too dependent on Spain, which had, in his opinion, brought us to this sorry state of affairs.

“Well, I can do some translations as I have enough battery supply on my laptop” I thought, until I couldn’t download the articles that had been sent to me from my non-existent e-mail connection.

Instead, I wandered to the little park by my house, parked myself on a bench as couples with children sprawled on rugs on the grass, and continued to read my book ‘Catastrophe – Europe goes to War – 1914 “by Max Hastings. As I read about the misery on the Eastern Front, I realised that despite the inconvenience and chaos, the sun was still shining, the trees had fresh green leaves and Spring blossoms, and the sweet perfume from the magnolia tree drifted towards me –  it was good to be alive!

Then came the press conference from the country’s grid supplier REN which was unable to come up with a concrete explanation of what had happened.

“If there are no interruptions by dawn the whole of the country should have energy”, assured João Conceição, the company’s CEO.

And added: “We can’t yet point to an exact cause. What we do know is that moments before 11.33 am large oscillations in the high-voltage power network in Spain were detected which spread to the downstream medium and low-voltage networks”.

As the lights came on in my neighbourhood at around 9.45pm, I put the candles away and pondered why were we so completely dependent on Spain for our power (60% that morning from solar powered sources), and why we didn’t have a independent backup that automatically kicks in under such circumstances, whatever the cause.

After all, it made a mockery of those trumpeted days between May 7 and 10, 2016 when Portugal ran on 100% renewable energy for a record 107 hours.

So, I questioned this energy current that links us to Spain and thought that maybe Luís Mira Amaral was right. Of course, there are contingency plans for such crises, but we cannot but ask why a country like Portugal, that can be self-sufficient in terms of energy, on that day couldn’t supply it to its consumers and was so dependent on Spain.

And we also must question why the hydroelectric power station at Castelo de Bode and the gas-fired power station at Tapada do Outeiro were the only two in Portugal that were able to ‘black start’, meaning automatically kick in to restart the power grid – or rather a portion of it – after that widespread outage which left Portugal’s grid without any external power.

All the solar farms we have didn’t make a world of difference. We were left powerless, both literally and figuratively, in a situation that would have made our great-grand parents laugh.