La Palma suffers a general blackout that leaves the whole island without light

The General Directorate of Emergencies of the Canary Islands government has declared an alert situation on the island of La Palma after recording, at 6:38 a.m. this Monday, a general electrical system failure that has left the entire island without power and affected more than 50,500 inhabitants. The general electrical system failure caused a zero energy state and the total loss of electricity supply in the island territory. For now, the origin of the blackout is still unknown, but the incident occurred in the middle of a strong electrical storm.

According to information provided by the Endesa company to the Efe agency, service recovery maneuvers are already underway. According to the same sources, early this Monday morning La Palma was in a pre-restoration situation following the general electrical system failure, awaiting the startup of generation groups and instructions from Red Eléctrica (REE) to restore the supply.

For its part, sources from Red Eléctrica explained to the Efe agency that the zero energy state occurred when the Los Guinchos thermal power plant—the island's only electricity transmission line—disconnected for reasons that are still unknown, although they could be related to the strong storm. In fact, this infrastructure had already recorded an incident during the early hours of this Monday, before the zero energy state occurred on the island of La Palma. The electricity grid company has stated that work has already begun on restoring the electricity supply as the power plant's generation groups are being coupled.

Therefore, the activation of the alert aims to monitor the evolution of the incident, facilitate coordination between the administrations and involved bodies, and evaluate possible impacts on essential services, while teams work to recover the supply progressively. The activation of the alert has been applied within the framework of the Territorial Emergency Plan for Civil Protection of the Canary Islands autonomous community (PLATECA).

"Zero energy" in Ceuta

The general blackout on La Palma occurred two weeks after the autonomous city of Ceuta suffered an "energy zero" on October 21st, when the entire city was left without power as a result of the failure of the Zona Centro distribution group which affected the rest. In this case, the "energy zero" lasted little more than an hour in the most affected area, the Zona Centro.