Morocco mobilised 38% of its production capacity to help power Spain back to life

RABAT - Morocco mobilised up to 38% of its production capacity on Monday afternoon to help Spain, which was the victim of a massive power outage that halted trains, shut airports and trapped people in lifts across the entire Iberian peninsula.

Morocco’s National Office of Electricity and Drinking Water (ONEE) has connected its network to Spain via the two existing interconnection lines across the Strait of Gibraltar, following a request from Red Eléctrica Española (REE), Spanish media reported.

"We have restored the interconnections (automatically cut off after the sudden failure of the peninsular network) and made some energy capacity available to allow the power plants in southern Spain to restart," a REE spokesperson told the media.

The cross-Strait interconnection system has an operational capacity of 1,400 megawatts. Immediately after the outage, Morocco, which previously imported 778 megawatts, made a total of 519 megawatts available to the Spanish operator, or 11.5% of its available electricity, according to Electricity Maps, a website that compiles real-time data on energy flows between countries.

Energy deliveries equivalent to 38.17% of the available instantaneous production capacity (thermal and gas power plants) in Morocco at this time.

A double electrical connection system, consisting of seven submarine cables, connects the coastal transformer station of Fardioua (28 kilometers east of Tangier) to the transformer station of Tarifa (Cadiz), at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula.

The electrical interconnection, built since 1988, is expected to be completed by two additional lines from 2028.

"Morocco compensated for the collapse in supplies from Spain on Monday by quickly starting up coal-fired power plants and natural gas-fired combined-cycle power plants," it said. 

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez praised Morocco’s move and announced a government investigation into the massive power outage.

Investigators from Spain's cybersecurity agency (INCIBE) and the CNI intelligence service will seek information from the country's grid operator, REE, and private energy companies, including in visits to their offices, as part of a probe into the causes of massive blackouts across Spain and Portugal on Monday, two sources told Reuters.

REE, which is headed by former Socialist minister Beatriz Corredor, has narrowed down the source of the outage to two separate incidents of loss of generation in substations in southwestern Spain, but says it has yet to identify their exact location and that it is too early to explain what caused them.