Arias Vasquez chairs meeting following recent power cuts

The Gibraltar Government has received a report on the causes of last Friday’s power cut and has contracted expert help to provide a detailed analysis of Gibraltar’s power supply network.

Gemma Arias Vasquez, the Minister with responsibility for power supply, chaired an all-parties meeting in her office on Tuesday morning following the recent general power cuts.

A spokesman for the Government confirmed it had received the report from the Gibraltar Electrical Authority on Friday’s outage and a third-party entity had been instructed to conduct a detailed assessment of the current state of play.

“The Government expects to be in a position to provide further updates this week, upon receipt of the report from the independent third-party entity,” the spokesman said.

Friday’s power cut was the result of a major earth fault in the Ocean Village area with electricity restored a couple hours later.

The power cut was the latest in a string of such outages and caused disruption to individuals and businesses, with the Chamber of Commerce this week expressing frustration at the situation and calling for compensation for losses.

So far there have been seven power cuts in 2026 and last Friday’s power cut also resulted on a British Airways flight being diverted to Malaga as the outage impacted air traffic control.

Hundreds of millions of pounds have been invested in Gibraltar’s energy infrastructure in recent years, including the new power station, the LNG plant, the BESS system and upgrades to the grid.

At the time of the outage last Friday at 2pm, the GEA was generating approximately 36.6 megawatts.