La Palma suffered yet another power cut yesterday, with over 50,000 customers across the island losing electricity for approximately three hours.
The causes of the outage, which hit the entire island just after 5.30pm, are not fully clear although the investigation focuses on a turbine failure at the Los Guinchos power station in Breña Alta. Minutes after the lights went out and traffic lights stopped working, energy firm Endesa and grid owner Red Eléctrica became embroiled in a war of words over where the fault lay.
Although power was eventually restored after 8pm and no major incidents needed to be dealt with by the emergency services, the loss of power has triggered further fury among households and businesses, not least because it is the fifth in just five weeks to affect all or part of La Palma. One outage, suffered on 8 May, hit almost 20,000 customers in eight towns on the island.
The Canaries’ energy minister Mariano Hernández Zapata, who was president of La Palma until 2023, had already warned Spain’s biggest energy company that the government “would not hesitate to take action” over the failures that have taken a massive toll on the island’s population and this latest outage is likely to prompt rapid intervention, most likely in the form of a heavy fine.
If financial sanctions are imposed, the government will be anxious to act more quickly than on previous occasions. In November 2024, it was ordered to repay around 50 million euros in fines handed down to energy companies in respect of power cuts in the Canaries, given that it had not carried out the sanction procedures within the required time limits.
The embarrassing gaffe, with the resulting loss of revenue for the public purse, led the government to amend regional legislation to extend the time limits for the procedures from 3 to 18 months.