By John — Desalination News
Lanzarote’s desalination network was knocked offline for the second time in a week on October 6, after a fresh round of power outages shut down two of the island’s main plants and several production lines, triggering new water cuts across its southern coast. The utility Aguas de Lanzarote y La Graciosa said the outages, which struck around 4:30 p.m. local time, halted the Lanzarote III and Lanzarote V plants along with several lines at the Janubio facility, forcing it to move up planned overnight supply cuts in La Villa de Teguise, Tahíche, Nazaret, and Mácher to 6 p.m. and warn residents to limit non-essential water use.
The outage compounds a far larger blackout just three days earlier. On October 3, a fault on the 66-kilovolt grid line at the Mácher substation in Tías cascaded into failures at the San Bartolomé and Punta Grande substations, knocking out power to roughly 73,600 customers — effectively the entire island except Playa Blanca, which stayed lit through its separate grid link to Fuerteventura. Because Lanzarote has no significant natural freshwater sources, the island depends almost entirely on desalination for drinking water, so the blackout immediately halted production across its plants. Restoring the electricity grid didn’t restore water output right away either: desalination plants need time to restart and stabilize, and the water utility spent the following days gradually bringing supply back to Arrecife, Tías, San Bartolomé, and Haría while Yaiza and parts of Teguise lagged behind. Even once the plants were running again, officials said reserves in the main Zonzamas storage tanks remained “very tight” and warned that further temporary supply maneuvers might be needed to rebuild them.
That the island’s desalination plants went down again just days later, before storage levels had fully recovered, underscores how exposed Lanzarote’s water supply is to any disruption on the electricity grid. Neither outage has a confirmed root cause yet. The Canary Islands’ regional energy department has asked the companies that manage Lanzarote’s grid to explain what failed and why, and said the back-to-back incidents show the island’s electricity system needs further reinforcement — including grid upgrades and energy storage batteries — to prevent water supply from being this vulnerable to a single point of failure. Officials have also said they will pursue accountability if the investigation finds it is warranted.
For now, the practical effect is familiar to residents: intermittent supply cuts, reduced pressure, and official appeals to conserve water while plants restart and tanks refill. Repeated incidents in recent months have made grid-related desalination outages something of a recurring hazard on Lanzarote, and this week’s double disruption — a major island-wide blackout followed within days by a second, more localized one — adds urgency to the regional government’s push to shore up the power network that the island’s water supply now runs on.
(Source: La Voz de Lanzarote, RTVC)