Czech Republic Recovering From Blackout After Grid Issue

(Bloomberg) -- The Czech Republic is recovering from widespread power outages that halted public transport and businesses in several parts of the country after a fault on the transmission grid.

Tram services resumed in capital Prague and the city of Liberec after central and northern areas of the country were without electricity for several hours on Friday, the CTK news service reported. 

The cause of blackout was a technical failure, while there there is no indication of an outside malicious action, such as a cyberattack, Prime Minister Petr Fiala told reporters in Prague.

“I’m glad that the system functioned as it should have in the crisis situation and that everything quickly returned to normal,” Fiala said, adding that the authorities would conduct a detailed analysis of the incident. 

The second major outage in Europe this year raises questions about the resilience of the continent’s power system. In April, a much larger Spanish blackout affected more than 50 million people on the Iberian Peninsula, but even after months of investigations it remains unclear who is to blame.

The initial reason for the Czech outage was a fallen high-voltage line in the western part of the country, which knocked offline nine of the country’s 44 main substations, Fiala said. All of them were later reconnected. 

Prague’s airport wasn’t affected, nor were most banking systems or phone networks, although several ATMs were down and some mobile phone customers were impacted, according to CTK. 

The power outage hit some industrial enterprises, with Orlen Unipetrol shutting its Litvinov refinery and Volkswagen AG’s Skoda Auto also temporarily halting its production.

(Updates with prime minister’s comments starting in the third paragraph.)

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