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Spain has spread the blame for the catastrophic Iberian blackout between its grid operator and electricity companies, saying the April outage stemmed from a combination of “bad planning” and errors at power plants.
Announcing the findings of a 49-day probe into what went wrong, Sara Aagesen, Spain’s energy and environment minister, said several factors combined to leave the country unable to control a surge in voltage that should have been manageable.
The Socialist-led government’s conclusions are likely to pave the way for a wave of compensation claims.
“The next phase will be the administrative and judicial proceedings that determine how this whole process ends,” Aagesen said. The outage on April 28 left 60mn people across Spain and Portugal without power.
But the minister said the government’s full report, which was published late on Tuesday, would not name specific electricity companies or individual power plants for reasons of “confidentiality”.
Spain’s three main power utilities — Iberdrola, Endesa and Naturgy — have been in a war of words with grid operator Red Eléctrica over the blackout.
Aagesen confirmed that the outage’s immediate cause was a surge in voltage on the grid, which triggered the disconnection of multiple generation plants in a cascade that brought down the system in Spain and Portugal.
Pointing a finger at Red Eléctrica, she described as “bad planning” its decision the day before the blackout to not replace a conventional power plant — either gas or nuclear — that had been scheduled for operation on the day of the outage but at the last minute became unavailable.
“What they have relayed to us [from Red Eléctrica] is that they did their calculations and they estimated that it was not necessary,” Aagesen said. The plant was one of 10 intended to play a role in regulating voltage on the grid, as opposed to simply providing electricity.
Aagesen cast blame on the electricity companies, too. Many power plants disconnected automatically from the grid to protect equipment from the voltage surge, but she said: “With the available information, we can also state that some of these disconnections occurred improperly.”
She also said the utilities were at fault — without identifying any by name — because some power plants did not do their job in “absorbing” what is known as reactive power, electricity that oscillates between generators and final consumers and helps keep voltage levels stable.
“They were either not properly programmed, or the ones that were programmed did not provide what the standards require,” she said. “But what we can say today is that there wasn’t a shortage of generation. There was enough to respond.”
Beatriz Corredor, chair of Red Eléctrica’s parent company, had already accused the power plant operators of falling short.
The minister said the voltage surge itself was caused by oscillations in the frequency at which the electrical current changes direction. Some oscillations were natural, she said, but one was “atypical”. The unusual change originated from a solar power plant in south-west Spain near the city of Badajoz, the government report said.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government has consistently argued that the blackout was not caused by Spain’s high reliance on renewable energy.
Aagesen said the government had concluded there was no cyber attack behind the blackout, although its analysis identified significant cyber vulnerabilities that needed to be fixed.
Additional reporting by Carmen Muela
