Spain, Portugal seek cause of outage

Mass blackout worst ever seen in Europe

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Electricity had been restored to most of Spain and Portugal early yesterday after huge nationwide blackouts, although authorities were still trying to find out what caused the sudden outage.

In Spain, schools and offices reopened, public transport restarted after long delays, traffic gridlock eased and many hospitals had recovered power while others continued to operate on generators.

Spain's electricity grid operator Red Electrica said it was able to supply virtually all of the country's electricity demand yesterday morning, while Portugal's equivalent, REN, said that by late on Monday it had all 89 power substations in the country back up and running.

The authorities are now being pressed for an explanation of what caused one of the biggest power outages ever seen in Europe.