European press review

As electricity is restored to most of Italy after the country's worst power failure, the blackout attracts comment in newspapers across Europe on Monday.

Many debate the origin of the fault and wonder whether the same thing could happen to national grids in other European countries.

In Italy itself, the newspapers are full of coverage of the power cuts.

"The blackout has paralysed Italy" reads the headline in La Repubblica. The front-page picture in Corriera della Sera shows a baker making bread by candlelight.

'Passing the buck'

The question of who is responsible for the blackout preoccupies several papers, with most believing that Switzerland is to blame.

"Italy suffers a total power cut of 14 hours because a tree fell in Switzerland," according to a headline in Spain's El Mundo.

In a front-page article, Le Figaro notes that France, initially accused of involvement, denied that it was to blame and instead pointed the finger at Switzerland.

"For the time being, everybody is trying to pass the buck," the paper says.

Geneva's Tribune de Geneve acknowledges that an incident in Switzerland might have been behind the power cut.

"A tree which fell on a 380,000 volt line at 0300 hours near Brunnen could be at the origin of the blackout," it says.

But it quotes a spokesman for the power company in charge of the line as casting doubt on the explanation, on the grounds that the power supply from Switzerland to Italy was restored within half an hour.

"Italian operators, who were warned by phone, apparently failed to react sufficiently quickly," the paper quotes the spokesman as saying.

Society has become increasingly vulnerable and dependent Sweden's Aftonbladet

Scandinavian outage

Italy's blackout reminds Swedish papers of a power failure in Denmark and southern Sweden last Tuesday.

Stockholm's Aftonbladet believes that the power cut demonstrates that "society has become increasingly vulnerable and dependent".

Another Stockholm paper, Dagens Nyheter, agrees. The power failure destroys "the myth of our invincibility," it says.

The paper suggests that the both the Scandinavian and Italian outages were caused by reliance on imported power.

Both Italy and Sweden have shunned nuclear power.

It says that in effect saying 'no' to nuclear power and oil and gas in southern Sweden means 'yes' to coal in Denmark, Germany and Poland - "an alternative which is environmentally far inferior, even to the major Swedish oil-fired power stations which were put in mothballs for environmental reasons."

German power

Two German papers are divided over whether the same thing could happen in Germany.

Berlin's Der Tagesspiegel suggests not. The paper believes that the outage was the result of a lack of investment in infrastructure in the wake of energy market liberalisation.

We shall be spared breakdowns such as in Italy Germany's Der Tagesspiegel

It argues that although in theory the German market, too, was reformed in 1998, "de facto" not much has changed since established energy companies carved up the market between them.

According to the paper, in Germany, unlike in Italy, it is in the energy companies' interest to maintain their networks because they make money by hiring them out to other firms. "We shall therefore be spared breakdowns such as in Italy," it concludes.

But Die Welt points out that since the beginning of liberalisation, investment in the energy sector has declined in Germany, too.

The paper predicts that increasingly individual firms and households will produce electric power themselves to cover their own needs while the public network will become less and less reliable, including major blackouts from time to time.

"But then this won't be worth reporting any more," it says.

The European press review is compiled by BBC Monitoring from internet editions of the main European newspapers and some early printed editions.