Firms scramble for battery power in Spain and Portugal

On the 28 April last year, Portugal and Spain went dark for several hours.

A massive power failure caused widespread chaos . People dug out lanterns and old radios, and companies scrambled to save what production they could.

The Spanish meat processing firm Fribin, in Binéfar, in the north eastern province of Aragon, was midway through its morning shift when the sudden shutdown brought production lines to a halt.

For Andrés Altabás, Fribin's technology and systems director, it was a nightmarish situation.

Emergency systems didn't have the capacity for continued operation. "Refrigeration was prioritised but all the lines had to be stopped," he adds.

Many tonnes of meat in the processing stage had to be discarded. "There were losses of hundreds of thousands of euros," says Altabás.

The bosses at Fribin realised they had to rethink their back up plans.

It was a big undertaking as the company's energy needs are "quite large", amounting to more than 25 gigawatt-hours a year, most of it for refrigeration.

The business had been considering investing in a battery back-up system for years, but it had been judged too expensive.

"And then came the blackout, and all of that together catalysed the investment," Altabás tells the BBC.

The first purchase of a five megawatt-hour module was made in June 2025, and a second module with the same storage capacity was ordered in early June 2026, both amounting to a total investment of around €1.5m (£1.3m; $1.7m), funded in part by the European Union's Next Generation funds.

Firms across Europe have been switching to electricity from fossil fuels for their industrial needs, encouraged by subsidies from EU funds.

While that is helping bring down emissions of climate-warming gases, it has also made firms more vulnerable to power cuts.

And in Spain and Portugal that threat was made painfully clear last year.