Spanish island hit by major power cut
The Canary island of La Palma was hit by a major power cut on Thursday morning, just 10 days after mainland Spain suffered a blackout.
According to La Palma's government, more than a third of its 85,000-strong population was without power for around 45 minutes.
Alberto Hernandez, the Canary Islands' energy chief, said a substation failure had caused a mismatch between energy supply and demand, which in turn triggered a power cut to protect the generating equipment.
The blackout was the second power cut to hit La Palma in a week. A smaller one left around 300 households and businesses without power for several hours last Thursday.
Fernando Gonzalez, La Palma's councillor in charge of energy, asked the Canary Islands government to seek solutions to the power problems on the island.
He said: 'La Palma is suffering from an energy emergency.'
The archipelago's government announced last month that it would install eight temporary fuel-burning power plants across Tenerife, Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura.
However, the overall plan, overseen by Spain's climate transition ministry, is to boost the use of renewable energy as sun and wind is relatively reliable on the archipelago, which is located off the coast of northwestern Africa.
In 2024, renewable energy accounted for 21 per cent of the electricity generated in the Canary Islands, compared to 57 per cent for the whole of Spain.
The blackout that struck Spain on April 28 did not affect the Canary Islands, which, like the Balearic Islands and the Spanish North African territories of Ceuta and Melilla, has its own power supply.
Pedro Sanchez, Spain's prime minister, has come under fire from the conservative opposition for not giving a reason for the outage and for refusing to rethink his plan to shut down the country's nuclear power plants.
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