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.