Czech Republic Recovering From Blackout After Grid Issue
Underground trains and some tram lines in Prague have resumed service after central and northern areas were without electricity on Friday morning, CTK news service reported. Electricity distributor PRE Group said it expected to reconnect supplies to affected parts of the city by around 4 p.m. local time.
It's the second major outage in Europe this year following a voltage issue on Spain's power network in April that caused a blackout for more than 50 million people on the Iberian Peninsula. It's taken months for the investigations to be carried out into what happened in Spain and it still hasn't been decided who is to blame. A second event so soon after, raises serious questions for operators about how resilient Europe's power system is.
The grid operator said it didn't know what had caused the incident, CTK reported. Police wrote on X there were no indications that a terrorist or cyber attack was behind the blackout.
The Czech outage occurred in 8 out of the country's 44 main substations, of which five are now back online, CTK reported, citing national grid operator CEPS. Substations contain the equipment that connects the high voltage transmission grid with the distribution grid so it can carry power to homes and businesses.
Prague's airport wasn't affected, nor were most banking systems or mobile phone networks, according to CTK.
--With assistance from Peter Laca.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
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