Power Cuts in Spain and Portugal

Newscast

BBC

Politics, News

4.4 • 6.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today, Spain and Portgual have been hit by large power cuts. The Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez says the cause is still unknown.

Adam is joined by Rachel Morison, Energy Editor at Bloomberg, and Professor Keith Bell, Professor of Future Power systems at the University of Strathclyde, to discuss what we know - and what we don’t - about the huge power outages on the Iberian peninsula. Plus, what is the UK energy grid’s plan for if something similar were to happen here?

And the Kremlin has announced a three-day ceasefire in Ukraine, just after Donald Trump said he might be ready to walk away from negotiations and accusing Vladimir Putin of not wanting to end the war. Russia Editor Steve Rosenberg joins from Moscow to discuss what concessions Russia is seeking in a peace deal.

You can now listen to Newscast on a smart speaker. If you want to listen, just say "Ask BBC Sounds to play Newscast”. It works on most smart speakers. You can join our Newscast online community here: https://discord.gg/m3YPUGv9

New episodes released every day. If you're in the UK, for more News and Current Affairs podcasts from the BBC, listen on BBC Sounds: https://bit.ly/3ENLcS1 Newscast brings you daily analysis of the latest political news stories from the BBC. It was presented by Adam Fleming. It was made by Miranda Slade with Alix Pickles and Shiler Mahmoudi. The technical producer was Mike Regaard. The assistant editor is Chris Gray. The editor is Sam Bonham.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:05.1	Hello, lots of chat over the weekend about the local elections in England on Thursday.
0:11.4	And thank you to Mark on the Discord server and Discord being that app where you can sign up to talk about newscast,
0:17.0	who suggested we bring back this old favourites.
0:20.5	Music newscast, who suggested we bring back this old favourites.
0:31.1	Now, people who are listening to Newscast during the general election will recognise that,
0:38.6	or maybe they won't, as the signature theme tune to our signature item, remoter voter.
0:47.3	And the idea behind that was that we found out people's interesting reasons for why they couldn't vote in person on polling day back then.
1:00.0	And we had remote, remoter, remotest in increasing distances from your home and the polling station. And we got some amazing stories and it was actually just a brilliant way of finding out all the interesting things that you do and the things going on in people's lives.
1:02.0	So we're bringing it back for the local elections.
1:05.0	Remoter, local voter, which is harder to say that it is to write down.
1:10.0	Anyway, let us know via email or WhatsApp if there's an intriguing reason why maybe you're just a few blocks away from the polling station but can't make it on the day, or you're in another country, or maybe you're on another continent, or maybe you've done a Katie Perry and you're in space.
1:26.9	No pressure.
1:28.2	Let us know. Email address is newscast at BBC.co.uk. And you can WhatsApp us on 0-330-123-9-4-80.
1:38.6	And that will be newscast being hyper-local, but the rest of this episode is going to be
1:43.1	quite international because there's some big things going on in the world, and we will the rest of this episode is going to be quite international because there's
1:44.4	some big things going on in the world, and we will discuss them on this episode of Newscast.
1:49.2	Newscast from the BBC. He has just compared me to the fat controller. Did I say that? I can't
1:56.4	believe I said that. Next question. This is R for the benefit of Earth. I'm not personally a huge Sabrina Carpenter fam.
2:03.7	I don't think I'm being rude.
2:05.1	I like landscapes.
2:06.2	Take me down to Downey Street.
	...

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