The outage started in Paris at around 10 PM local time. Emergency numbers were inundated with calls, to the point that responders put out a plea to the public to stop calling. Rail operator SNCF said many regular and high-speed electric trains were stalled on the tracks, causing systemwide delays.

The big screen in the control center of power grid operator RTE shows France's predicted power demand in blue, and actual power demand in red, for yesterday. Source: AFP. View video (in French).

Western Europe was very near a total blackout, according to a report in Le Monde. It is the worst such event in France since the December 1978 outage that left 3.6 million without power.

What caused the Europe blackouts

A cold spell swept across western Europe, driving up electricity consumption. Fundamentally, demand exceeded supply, causing the blackouts. Utilities and grid operators isolated the source of the problem and worked quickly to correct it. Meanwhile, 5,200 MW of the total 56,000 MW of load were cut off, and so was 10 percent of the population.

The source: German utility E.On was in the midst of a routine disconnection of a power line that crosses a river in northwestern Germany, as a safety precaution while a ship passed beneath it. Officials say it was this disconnection combined with the cold snap that triggered the shortage. Within seconds, about 15 major lines switched offline automatically, severing the European grid.

"Europe came very close to a complete blackout."
--Pierre Bornard, European grid operator RTE.

Shortfall foreseen

Last month Energy Priorities blogged a report issued by Capgemini saying that many EU countries were getting nervous about having enough electricity supply to meet peak demands, and said that energy conservation and investments in alternatives are urgent.

Critics blame privatization

European energy security has degraded over many years, as demand has grown but investment in energy production have not kept up. It routinely causes problems and isolated outages throughout Europe.

Opponents of the partial privatization of Electricite de France (EDF) -- primarily labor unions -- say the deteriorating quality of power supply and the more frequent blackouts are the result. They criticize European trends toward privatizing and dismantling state-run energy monopolies.

Italy and U.S. retain most-severe-outage honors

Transmission lines are often behind large-scale blackouts. There was enough production capacity in Europe on Saturday night, but it could not get to where it was needed, according to a grid operator.

On September 28, 2003, Italy was cast into darkness by a high-tension transmission line failure. The massive outage left some 57 million inhabitants without power, some for 20 hours. It was the European echo of the August blackout in the northeastern U.S., blamed on a similar line failure.

In the European transmission and distribution system, the grid operator said, "everyone is interconnected, it's one big machine."