A power outage has hit the Canary Islands, affecting more than 50,000 people and disrupting traffic lights and shops.
The island of La Palma went dark at 5.32pm after a ‘generation turbine tripped’ at the Los Guinchos power plant in Breña Alta.
Around 90% of the island was without power for two hours, Canarias7 reported.
As of 8.12pm, more than 50% of power has been restored, the island’s Security and Emergency Department said on X.
Canary Islands President, Fernando Clavijo, added on the platform that officials are working to ‘restore power as quickly as possible’.
The Canary Islands Emergency Plan (PLATECA) was activated at 6pm local time, declaring the blackout an ’emergency situation’.
Coming only months after Spain’s nationwide blackout, La Palma president Sergio Rodríguez said the island is not in the ‘first world’.
He added: ‘We have a completely obsolete power plant that’s been around for more than 50 years.’
‘La Palma is an island that wants to develop; it must aim to restructure its entire energy system, starting with the systems we currently have.’
A notice on an outage map by Endea, Spain’s largest utility company, says ‘improvement works on the electrical grid’ are impacting supply.
La Palma’s power has been knocked out four times since May 8, when a failure in a substation at the same Los Guinchos power plant left 19,526 customers without power for nearly two hours.
The island heavily relies on planet-warming fossil fuels as it is not connected to the mainland, meaning failures at power plants can ripple across the island’s fragile power grid, Spanish tech hub Xataka said.
Spain suffered a daylong power outage in April, upending the lives of millions of people. Hospitals were forced to run on generators, trains stopped running and many schools closed.
Panic buying quickly spread, with shopkeepers having to keep track of cash-only transactions using pen and paper.
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