UK security reviews have been looking at how to deal with “different kinds of challenges and threats”, the Home Secretary has said following major power outages across Spain and Portugal.
Major parts of both countries were brought to a standstill on Monday when power cuts switched off traffic lights, left people unable to access cash machines and caused chaos at airports.
Asked whether the power cut there had triggered fears that British infrastructure could be affected in the same way, the Home Secretary said the UK has a “continued approach” to “resilience” and “security issues”.
“We’ve been looking, as part of wider security reviews across the country, how we deal with both resilience and also different kinds of challenges and threats,” Yvette Cooper told Sky News.
“Some of which can be the traditional security challenges, some of which can be the kinds of resilience – things that we’re talking about in Spain and Portugal – and we obviously support them and the governments there in the work that they’re doing.”
Spanish power distributors said on Tuesday morning that more than 99% of power has been recovered.
But the blackout saw train passengers stranded and millions of people left without phone and internet access after the outage on Monday.
Dozens of flights from Portuguese and Spanish airports were grounded.
Portugal’s capital city airport in Lisbon was worst affected, while Barcelona and Madrid airports were the most impacted in Spain.
Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said a "strong oscillation" in the European grid was behind the outage, but the cause was still being determined. He asked the public to refrain from speculation and urged people to call emergency services only if really necessary.
Meanwhile, Portuguese grid operator REN said a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” took place due to extreme temperature variation in Spain and warned that fully restoring the country's power grid could take up to a week.
The Portuguese National Cybersecurity Centre said in a statement there was no indication that the outage was caused by a cyber attack.
It comes just weeks after Heathrow Airport was forced to halt operations for most of a day after a power outage caused by a substation fire.
The airport was closed to all flights until around 6pm on March 21, which disrupted more than 270,000 air passenger journeys.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said at the time that the Government will “have to look hard” at the “resilience” for major institutions such as Heathrow.
