The SUNRISE project approach is user-driven, with national as well as cross-country workshops conducted in a systematic manner with participants that include representatives of 18 CI operators from 8 EU countries who are partners in the consortium and serve as pilot users, as well as other CI operators external to the project who are invited to provide feedback.
In the first year of the SUNRISE project, the workshop theme was to extract lessons learned from the COVID crisis, as well as to collect useful information about challenges, scenarios, and needs. However, on May 6th, 2025, when the third Spanish workshop with national CI operators took place, many discussions focused on the “gran apagón,” a major power blackout that occurred across the Iberian Peninsula just one week before the workshop, on April 28th. Electric power was interrupted for about ten hours, which caused severe disruptions in telecommunications, transportation systems, and other CIs. As of May 6th, the reasons for this outage were still not publicly known or at least not confirmed, so it is not surprising that many discussions centered around the cause, effects, and above all, the exchange of lessons learned among CI operators who gathered in Madrid from different regions of Spain—many of them invited by the National Center for Critical Infrastructure Protection (CNPIC), which is also a partner in SUNRISE.
While energy blackouts are universally considered in all critical infrastructure operators’ business continuity plans, a prolonged loss of power, such as the one that happened on the Iberian Peninsula, caused a domino effect across multiple sectors (e.g., in some regions, water treatment and distribution were affected, the unavailability of traffic lights caused transport bottlenecks, and communications broke down).
Cell towers, routers, data centers, and switching stations require continuous power, and while some have backup generators or batteries, these are limited in duration (often 2–8 hours). The prolonged blackout exceeded telecommunication providers’ backup capacity, shutting down towers and equipment. During the SUNRISE workshop in Madrid, several CI operators explained the particularities of their business continuity planning, which did not account for prolonged communication shutdowns.
Core internet service provider (ISP) infrastructure also relies on powered fiber-optic amplifiers, switches, and routing equipment. When central nodes lost power, large portions of internet traffic went down. Again, dependency on ISP infrastructure is a particular issue considered in different ways by each CI provider. The same applies to transport, where the SUNRISE demand prediction tool, for example, could have been used in drills to predict the situation in public transport. Since metro and trains were shut down due to the energy blackout, only buses were operational at first and had to be reinforced on the fly.
SUNRISE also addresses the idea of unifying strategy implementation processes, from risk assessment to business continuity planning, to enable critical infrastructures and critical entities to improve their awareness and resilience when facing future pandemics. This includes wide-ranging, multi-criteria effects by considering multiple domains and providing guidelines for universally applicable steps. In addition, the SUNRISE Policy Task Force has already issued two papers outlining the project’s understanding of the various challenges faced by operators and domains, as well as the decision-making gaps between these two levels.
All in all, while it is not possible to cover all the unique characteristics of every CI and its domain, workshop participants agree that SUNRISE is providing a solid backbone from which all operators and coordinators can benefit. Understanding common ground can also enable the deployment of sector- or region-specific solutions, and in cases where specific characteristics have particular impact and importance, SUNRISE should support their integration—enriching the knowledge of all CIs from a cross-domain and pan-European perspective, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
With this in mind, we also invite you to register and participate in the final cross-border SUNRISE workshop, to be held online on June 6th. Registration link is available here.
