The only town on the Peninsula that avoided the massive blackout

In the province of León, in the heart of the Picos de Europa Natural Park, a small municipality managed to avoid the massive blackout that affected the entire Iberian PeninsulaThis is Oseja de Sajambre. This small municipality, with only 226 inhabitants, has an energy island system that allowed it to maintain its supply, and even residents of neighboring municipalities came to charge their cell phones and other devices, for example, so this high-voltage power station can be self-sufficient when there is a power outage. Most of the municipality's residents "didn't notice" the power outage, except "those who were watching television," the mayor of Oseja de Sajambre, Antonio Jaime Mendoza, told Europa Press. The supply system went into island mode because there was a nationwide blackout, and at that moment, the "magnitude of the situation" hit them. In just half an hour, he stated, the municipality was electrically self-sufficient. Snowfall, gusty winds, and storms, which often left the municipality without power, made it difficult for the municipality to maintain its electricity supply.

The municipality has three hydroelectric plants that generate electricity and feed it into the general grid, passing through Asturias and Cantabria. Along this route, which runs through a high mountain area, when there is a lot of wind and snow, the system often fails because cables and towers break, or the cables become crossed.

For this reason, more than 15 years ago, an agreement was reached with Los Navarros, the company that owned two of the plants at the time (currently operated by Altano Hidro), to find a way to island one of the plants—that is, disconnect it from the general grid—and use it only for automobiles.

In this way, when a problem arises that affects the supply, the current to Asturias is cut off, and one of the plants is used to provide electricity to the entire municipality.

The mayor of Oseja de Sajambre believes that what happened on Monday due to the blackout should prompt an "important" reflection in the social sphere on the change a country can undergo in a matter of seconds. He also believes it is necessary to reflect on policies that advocate being "the cleanest in the world" from an energy perspective, but "it cannot be" that the country goes "from white to black in a minute." "That is an example of what can happen," he concluded.