We live in the Moraira area and am sick and tired of the frequent power cuts (three so far today - 4.30pm).
I've lost count of how many we've had over the past months (and years BTW) even if they are sometimes only fairly brief they are so annoying.
I recall many years ago when I first came to live here I was speaking to a Spaniard and he was amazed to hear that we'd experienced more power cuts in the first few weeks than in all the years I had lived in the UK.
Why is the power supply situation so appallingly unreliable here? Goodness knows how someone running a business manages!
What possible technical reason can there be for the power to go off, then a couple of minutes later come back on again?
Are we just unlucky where I live or do others experience this?

Hola

Yes when I first came here, "power cuts" were the norm; they were caused by people turning the electricity off, connecting up an illegal house, and putting the power back on.

Yes there were "proper" power cuts where transformers blew up because too much electricity was being pulled through it.

I have a UPS for "the important bits" so I have some electricity

Davexf

Thanks for that. For us though they are still "the norm"!
BTW power cut number 4 at 5.10pm. Pathetic IMO.
Don't quite follow how someone turning their (?) electricity off and putting it back on again can affect a whole area.

Hola

The electric for an area would be turned off, people shin up the pole / dig underground, then connect to the electricity supply so they get free electric. Not many people wanted to work on live electrics !!!

Davexf

Power off, then on again in five minutes?

I wonder if the cuts are affecting the neighbourhood, or just your house.
It may be that the supply to your property is deficient in its power to provide for the wants of the equipment being used. You may wish to check the contract with the supplier to see if it is in fact sufficient for purpose.

Good point and thanks. This has crossed my mind, but when it's dark I see the whole area blacked out. Of course I can't check during daylight hours.
If it was solely my problem, I can't understand how the power restores itself after a few minutes as no fuses have tripped. However, I'm not that knowledgeable to know enough about the subject.
Thanks again.

To put it another way, did you select the lowest cost (read: lowest potencia) contract, and have a "digital" meter? If you exceed the contracted maximum for even a second, the digital meter will cut you off for a few minutes and then restore power until you "violate" it again.

If this is the case, then if you run the wash machine while ironing, this could be the cause. You are exceeding your contracted maximum for a few seconds.

The problem with the digital meters is that even when you contract for a higher potencia (and higher cost per kilowatt), it can take months (if ever) for someone to come out and re-program your meter to allow you to use more power at any given second. But you still pay for the higher potencia contract, even though you are not allowed to use it.

You are not the only one who suffers power cuts. Our village is served by a very rusty and no doubt cheap in its day, transformer that is 33 years old. When it was put in its main use would have been for a few light bulbs and a tele. During normal weather (thankfully most of the time) it works fine though inexplicably we have very brief power cuts in the morning usually on the hour of half hour. Sometimes it is just one or two of the phases that go AWOL.

Bad weather is another thing altogether. Then we have multiple cuts some lasting a second others much longer. 10 minutes or maybe half an hour. We have a good view of neighbouring villages and you can see them come back on then go off and then back on. We have a vivid picture of Frankenstein like switching as the Endesa technicos struggle to get all back on and keep it on.

Only rarely does our box trip so it is a widespread outage.

I raised the subject with our village alcalde hoping he would raise it with Endesa. Not interested. His and most locals attitude is we have electricity and that is sufficient. I also pointed out one wooden pylon is broken and he made a valid point that if we complain we will doubtless have to pay for it to be fixed.

Far fetched? Our nearest neighbour has a basic single phase supply off our line which is three phase. He complained to Endesa that his supply was weak. They made him have his household wiring certified (new boletin) and then pronounced no fault with overhead supply. To get strong electric he would need new overhead cabling at his expense (4000) euros.

Now two of our three phases are an acceptable voltage but the third is 174 volts . I bet his phase is that one! I also bet that no one checked that.

Yes, in Spain you can depend on power cuts during bad weather.

I find the boletin thing rather stupid (or clever). After realising that the 10.8Kw tariff that Endesa convinced us to sign up for was much too expensive (also requiring a "boletin" for €300 to get), we discovered that a 5.4Kw contract was more than sufficient for purpose, but to get that contract, we had to get another €300 "boletin" to ensure our house was safe for the lower capacity. The previous boletin was unacceptable.

Most ironic is that in both cases, the "boletins" were issued by a "professional" electrician who never set foot on the property to inspect anything. It was simply... go to their office, ask for the "boletin" and pay €300 for them to stamp a document. Really cheeky.

The whole energy sector in Spain is just a government-complicit fleecing of the population. I would have expected some very nasty legal wrangling by now. But the energy companies employ a lot of people, and are just too powerful. Nobody wants to take them on.

Thanks for the responses, but if it was in some way the responsibility of my electricity supply then how is it explainable that sometimes we wake in the morning to find that during the night we have had at least one power cut indicated by the fact that the clock on the oven is flashing zeros and has to be reset ? During the night only my router is consuming power!
I'm more inclined to believe that Iberdrola is investing in very little infrastructure, investing more of its considerable resources in taking over overseas power companies! After all its Spanish profits are pretty much protected by its monopoly.

I don't know how it is there, but Iberdrola is a very small fish here. Endesa is a textbook "monopoly" here. You can buy energy from Iberdrola, but that equates to simply being billed by Iberdrola for Endesa services. Prices are more or less the same regardless of who bills you for it.

It's the government "regulation" that enables Endesa to profit around €5bil annually, whilst crying that they need their government subsidies to be able to stay in business, and demanding collection of back-subsidies, which has led to the brilliant idea to tax solar into oblivion to pay Endesa all their back-subsidies.

Amazing really when you think that the EU has such so-called strict competition rules and a free market throughout Europe. How does Spain escape all this?
Telephone, Internet etc etc, there is effectively NO competition.I see all the advice on UK television regarding comparing suppliers in all sorts of services and changing to a more efficient supplier, but here NADA.

I don't know. I really don't get it. I would have thought there would have been a big investigation and clamp-down on it by now. But no. It's still a good 'ol boy network sucking amongst the world's highest rates and profits (not to mention amongst the poorest services in the industrialised world). And it's all government-regulated (read: complicit), and highly anti-competitive. I reckon they're just too big of an employer of taxpayers to mess with.

We had this issue when we were on builders supply. It was frustrating. After we arranged our own contract and uprated the supply no more power cuts.