This unusual situation points to a
perfect storm of poor grid management and
inadequate connections of solar facilities to the grid,
as well as other unknown faults. In my opinion, there is a good chance that the computer programmes in charge of managing these systems played an important role, as they may not have been suitably prepared for these kinds of situations.
Although the grid is divided into different zones that can be isolated from one another, all zones were affected when thousands of small solar facilities scattered throughout the grid were disconnected at once. In addition, the interconnection of mainland Spain with the European grid is weak, and a stronger connection to the stable French grid would facilitate the synchronisation of the Spanish grid.
Solar energy during the sunniest hours distorts all offers (at price or negative), making more stable sources economically unviable unless they have a guaranteed price, and discouraging their production. The question is therefore not one of renewables versus nuclear, but rather how much solar power can be in the grid at any given moment while also maintaining stability.
A more worrying root cause is the involvement of politics in REE, as its presidency is typically held by former ministers or high-ranking politicians. Its current president is
Beatriz Corredor, a lawyer and a former housing minister, and REE is pursuing the somewhat politicised objective of “100% renewables”.
Within hours of the outage on 28 April, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez raised suspicions that the origin of the blackout came from “private operators”, and he accused those arguing that more nuclear input would help stabilise the grid of
being ignorant. Spain’s current EU-endorsed energy roadmap includes phasing out all nuclear power stations between 2027 and 2035.
Two days after the blackout,
Corredor made public statements for the first time saying that an incident like this would not be repeated, a difficult assertion to make when the causes are still unknown.
It is essential that decisions on energy issues, such as “100% renewables”, have independent technical support that analyses and informs the public with rigour and transparency. A rational analysis should not pit renewables against nuclear, and technical bodies such as REE should be run by people outside of political power structures, preferably with the appropriate technical training. The European Union should also have a coordinated energy policy, and a Europe-wide electricity grid designed to deal with outages or potential external aggression.
