10 Million Left In The Dark In Europe

European officials and electricity firms were investigating Sunday why a supply problem in Germany left about 10 million people in darkness across the continent.

Saturday night's outage, which also halted German trains and trapped scores of people in elevators in France and Italy, was brief. There were no reported injuries.

But it raised fresh questions about the reliability of Europe's interconnected power grids and drew an immediate call for stronger coordination.

Generator E.On AG said the problems began in northwestern Germany, where its network became overloaded — possibly because it shut down a high-voltage transmission line over a river to let a ship pass safely.

E.On, one of Europe's biggest utilities, said it had carried out similar shutdowns in the past without incident and that it could not understand "where and why" the acute supply shortfall began.

French power distributor RTE said the problems in Germany helped cause a "brutal imbalance" in supply and demand across the continent, with the shortfall in the western part.

"Such imbalances must be corrected immediately to avoid a complete meltdown of the European electric system," RTE said in a statement.

As a result, RTE shut off supplies to some 5 million people, including in parts of Paris, for about a half-hour. It estimated that 10 million people were affected in all Europe.

The German government demanded a quick explanation from Essen-based E.On of what happened — and of how it will prevent any reoccurrence.

"Power outages of this kind are not only annoying for people, but also represent a considerable risk for the economy," Economy Minister Michael Glos said.

Theo Horstmann, a spokesman for another German power firm RWE AG, said the shortage caused substations across Europe to close down automatically to maintain supplies elsewhere.

Horstmann said the network's safety mechanisms functioned perfectly, heading off a dangerous drop in the frequency of power supplies.

RTE President Andre Merlin also insisted that Europe's power network had worked smoothly.

"Despite the outages, we were able to avoid a total blackout yesterday," Merlin told reporters on a conference call Sunday.

However, France's Industry Minister Francois Loos, interviewed by France Info radio, said the outage "showed us that investments are necessary, and that on the European level, we have an interest in discussing" those investments.

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi said the incident suggested Europe needed stronger coordination of its power supplies.

"My first impression is that there is a contradiction between having European (power) links and not having one European (power) authority," said Prodi, telling reporters in his home town of Bologna that he was seeking more information.

Italy was the victim of Europe's last major power outage in 2003, when a short in a power line in Switzerland started a chain reaction that left 95 percent of Italy's population in darkness for several hours.

A similar case hit the United States in 2003, when tree limbs touching a power line in Ohio triggered a blackout that cascaded across the east of the country and into Canada, affecting 50 million people.

Europe's latest blackout affected areas of Piedmont and Liguria in Italy's northwest, as well as Puglia, the southeastern "heel" of Italy's boot-shaped peninsula.

Parts of Germany including the industrial Ruhr region were also without power, delaying more than 100 trains for up to two hours, railroad Deutsche Bahn said.

Nearly all of France was affected, except for the southeast of the country. Firefighters in Paris said they had responded to nearly 40 calls from people stuck in elevators.

In Belgium, the region around the port city of Antwerp was the worst affected. The blackout forced rail companies to use buses and taxis to get passengers stranded at rail stations to their final destinations.

Spanish network Red Electrica said areas of Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza and the region of Andalucia were similarly affected.