The arson attack is believed to have been carried out by left-wing extremists, with a letter sent to authorities by a group calling itself the "Vulkangruppe," or Volcano Group, deemed as "credible" by police. Some 20,000 households remained without power on Wednesday, with energy supplier Berlin Stromnetz saying it will take until Thursday for electricity to be fully restored to affected areas.
The private utility has for years made maintenance and safety a second priority, after bonus payments to management and high shareholder returns. Along with the other big private power companies in the state, PG&E has asked for even more money from the ratepayers to bump up its stock price. Now an old transformer caught fire, and the company didn't have the resiliency to avoid a blackout that impacted a third of the city, and is still going as I write this.
The April 28th outage, described as Europe's severest in 20 years, halted transport, cut internet and telephone communications and plunged cities into darkness across mainland Spain and Portugal. A report by a European expert panel last week concluded that "cascading overvoltages" caused the blackout, with the findings in line with a Spanish government report in June that also blamed overvoltage. Overvoltage occurs when there is too much electrical voltage in a network, overloading equipment.
Granada is usually peaceful and sleepy, but people seemed on edge. Many felt unnerved, fearing that the blackout wasn't just an inconvenience but the beginning of something larger.
