Firms scramble for battery power in Spain and Portugal

On 28 April last year, Portugal and Spain experienced a massive power failure that lasted several hours. The outage caused widespread chaos, with people resorting to lanterns and old radios. Companies scrambled to salvage any production they could. Fribin, a Spanish meat processing firm, was in the midst of its morning shift when the sudden shutdown brought their production lines to a halt.

Technology and systems director Andrés Altabás described the situation as "nightmarish," as refrigeration was prioritized but all lines had to be stopped, leading to the discarding of hundreds of thousands of euros worth of meat.

The incident prompted Fribin to reconsider its backup plans. The company, with annual energy needs exceeding 25 gigawatt-hours, had previously deemed battery backup too expensive. However, the blackout catalyzed an investment, with two five megawatt-hour modules purchased in June 2025 and June 2026, respectively, for a total cost of around €1.5m. European Union funds played a role in financing the investment.

Across Europe, firms are switching to electricity from fossil fuels encouraged by EU subsidies, but this has also made them more vulnerable to power cuts. In Spain and Portugal, the threat was made painfully clear last year. The industrial sector was among the first to explore storage systems, as abrupt production drops could be detrimental. Miguel Matias, founder of the Portuguese energy services company Self Energy, noted the importance of backup systems for sensitive environments like hospitals and data centers.

Battery storage capacity in Spain has nearly doubled since last April, reaching 193MW in April 2026, while Portugal has installed energy storage systems in facilities such as Vista Alegre, a porcelain maker in the Iberian country. The blackout ultimately accelerated the process of implementing energy storage systems, as companies like Vista Alegre realized the benefits of being able to respond to sudden shocks in the energy network and potentially profiting from selling energy back to the grid.