An influence outage has hit the Canary Islands, affecting greater 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’ on the Los Guinchos power plant in Breña Alta.
Around 90% of the island was without power for 2 hours, Canarias7 reported.
As of 8.12pm, greater 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’.
An ’emergency situation’ was declared at 6pm however the order has since been revoked.
Coming only months after Spain’s nationwide blackout, La Palma president Sergio Rodríguez said the island is just not within the ‘first world’.
He added: ‘Now we have a totally obsolete power plant that’s been around for greater than 50 years.’
‘La Palma is an island that wishes 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 4 times since May 8, when a failure in a substation at the identical Los Guinchos power plant left 19,526 customers without power for nearly two hours.
The island heavily relies on planet-warming fossil fuels because it is just 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 tens of millions of individuals. Hospitals were forced to run on generators, trains stopped running and many colleges were closed.
Panic buying quickly spread, with shopkeepers having to maintain track of cash-only transactions using pen and paper. At the very least seven people died.
Get in contact with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
MORE: Spanish police cause uproar over photo of older women having fun with alfresco chat
MORE: Sunbed Wars 2025 arrives in Benidorm after holidaymakers ‘stampede’ for best loungers
MORE: Your favourite places to eat in Europe that aren’t the same old tourist traps
