The stench of a cover-up hangs over Spain’s massive power outage, the worst in a developed country in modern times.
Confidence in the ongoing investigations has reached rock bottom. The socialist government of Pedro Sánchez is trying to buy time by issuing explanations that are either technically incomprehensible or border on absurd.
Red Eléctrica, the company responsible for running the electricity grid, is accused of withholding information.
Sources in Brussels told The Telegraph that before the system collapsed, authorities had conducted an experiment to test how far they could push reliance on renewable energy while preparing for Spain’s hasty phase-out of nuclear power plants starting in 2027.
The government appears to have recklessly pushed ahead without making the necessary investments in a modern, 21st-century smart grid needed to ensure a stable energy supply.
The situation is reminiscent of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in 1986, which began as a test to simulate what happens to a cooling reactor under blackout conditions. Operators ignored warnings that reactor number four had insufficient power, leading to a cascading failure.
If the blackout turns out to have been a controlled experiment gone wrong, and this information was withheld from the public for nearly four weeks, the Spanish left risks forgetting the elections for a generation.
The government has effectively taken control of Red Eléctrica through a golden share, which violates EU norms. It placed a socialist politician at the helm of the company who had no experience in the field and was already facing massive criticism at the time. Her salary in this position is six times that of the Spanish Prime Minister.
The previous chief executive resigned in protest against the political interference, accusing the government of pushing its green agenda with “messianic” zeal without taking the necessary steps.
The Spanish Association of Electricity Companies (AELEC) has finally lost patience. In a blistering statement, it called the entire investigation a travesty.
How this saga unfolds has implications that extend far beyond Spain. Blackouts always raise the ideological temperature in the culture war. Spain’s dystopian Apagón comes at a time when the backlash against all things green in Western democracies is reaching its peak.
The traditional energy industry and the global right have used this episode to discredit renewable energy, hoping to drive a stake through the heart of net-zero policies.
“Spain reminds us that intermittent energy sources cannot replace reliable baseload power from fossil fuels or other stable sources,” Republican Senator Steve Daines said this week during a hearing on Capitol Hill.
The Apagón tells a different story. Several countries have a higher share of renewable energy in their electricity mix without experiencing blackouts, including the industrial powerhouse we call Germany. Senator Daines conflates the problem of intermittency with the separate issue of inertia and grid frequency.
AELEC, which includes Endesa, IBM, Iberdrola, and Schneider Electric, complained that the authorities had reversed the likely causal chain. It wasn’t the generators that failed to deliver stable power to the grid; it was the grid that failed to manage it and automatically shut down the generators, whether solar, wind, nuclear, or gas-fired.
Jose Donoso, the executive director of the Spanish Photovoltaic Association, previously explained to me: “We were like all the other victims. They simply cut us off the grid without informing us.”
Solar companies in the southern belt of Badajoz, Granada, and Seville are outraged by the blame game following the blackout, accusing them of either supplying too much or too little power—the story changes constantly—without ever providing any evidence for either. Donoso emphasizes that on the day of the blackout, the solar farms generated exactly the amount of electricity planned.
AELEC noted that authorities essentially limited the investigation to a 20-second period on April 28, deliberately ignoring the elephant in the room: a series of wild voltage fluctuations that began days earlier and exceeded “emergency” levels across the peninsula two hours before the blackout.
The voltage rose from the normal 220 Kilovolts (kV) to an extreme 250 kV, which led to safety shutdowns.
Authorities have provided nothing to support their claim that it all began with a sudden drop in power fed into the grid of 2.2 gigawatts, which supposedly triggered the chain reaction. The system can certainly handle drops of three gigawatts.
The government is suspected of trying to deflect its own responsibility: According to Bank of America, Spain has invested only 0.35 percent of its GDP in the grid over the past five years, compared to 0.8 percent in Germany and the UK for renewable energy.
“Years of underinvestment have left the grid struggling to keep pace,” explains Tancrede Fulop, an analyst at Morningstar. The returns allowed on regulated power grids have not kept pace with inflation.
There have been claims—and denials—that there was a lack of inertia in the grid shortly before the blackout, causing the frequency to drop below 50 hertz. Gas and nuclear power plants retain the kinetic energy of spinning rotors for a few seconds after a power outage, providing a critical buffer. Wind and solar power plants, on the other hand, cannot.
But this has long been known. Modern systems replicate inertia through other means, such as “grid-forming” inverters on wind and solar power plants. They can install synchronous capacitors in substations. The UK has a fleet of flywheels to the rescue.
Andries Wantenaar of Rethink Energy emphasizes that none of this is difficult or costly. “Spain was simply negligent,” he says.
Opponents of green energy often confuse the inertia problem with the separate question of what happens when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. The short-term answer is batteries, cryogenic compressed air, and interconnectors. Spain lacks all of these solutions.
The answer to long-term renewable droughts and blackouts is open to debate. I’m relaxed about using unabated gas to fill the gaps and survive the depths of winter, whether in Spain or the UK. The key is maintaining broad public support for decarbonization, and even if we only achieve 90 percent clean electricity by the mid-2030s, it would still be a success.
Absolutism is the enemy.
In Spain’s case, perhaps Mr. Sánchez would be better off ending the guerrilla war against its nuclear industry. Foro Nuclear has stated that Spain’s seven reactors have an average age of 47 years and could safely be extended to 60 years or more.
Until we know why tensions ran high before the blackout, it’s impossible to understand what really happened. Mr. Sánchez and his associates seem determined to prevent us from finding out.
It is the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party that should be held accountable in this fiasco. Green energy is the collateral victim.