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Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has insisted he will not deviate “a single millimetre” from his commitment to renewable energy even after a catastrophic blackout raised questions over the country’s power mix.
In his first remarks to parliament on last week’s Iberian power cut, Sánchez hit back at critics who have blamed the failure on Spain’s dependence on wind and solar power but acknowledged that the cause of the blackout is still not yet known.
The stunning collapse was one of Europe’s biggest-ever power outages and sparked doubts about Spain’s rapid rollout of renewable power and grid reforms, which Sánchez has presented as big achievements of his nearly seven years in office.
“We are not going to deviate a single millimetre from the energy road map we have planned since 2018,” Sánchez told parliament on Wednesday. “Not only are renewables our country’s energy future, they are our only and best option. They are the only way to reindustrialise Spain.”
The blackout occurred after Spain lost 15 gigawatts of electricity — 60 per cent of its supply — in just five seconds. That failure destabilised the grid and caused multiple other power stations to disconnect, with the grid operator unable to halt the cascade.
But with the underlying causes still a mystery, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the opposition People’s party, told Sánchez: “If you have zero conclusive information — zero, zero — how do you know that your energy policy had nothing to do with it? And how can you be sure that it’s not going to happen again if you don’t know what happened?”
The government is investigating what went wrong but has warned that it may not have firm answers for several weeks.
The prime minister insisted that on the day of the blackout, April 28, Spain’s power system was operating with a lower proportion of renewable energy in its mix — around 70 per cent just before the system failed — than on many previous days. The contribution of solar power specifically, however, was much higher than average.
“I’m afraid, ladies and gentlemen, that the issue is a bit more complex. It’s not black and white,” Sánchez said.
Some experts have suggested as a key weakness the fact wind and solar power plants lack the same “inertia” provided by large gas and nuclear plants, whose giant turbines keep spinning and help stabilise the system in the event of disruption.
Sánchez said the technology existed for solar power to play a stabilising role akin to turbine-based generation — and that half of Spain’s solar plants already had it. But regulators and the grid operator, he said, must now work to integrate that technology into the system.
Spain has Europe’s lowest ratio of grid spending to clean power investment, according to BloombergNEF, a data provider. In the past five years it has invested an average of 30 cents in the grid for every $1 it spent on renewables, compared with an average of 70 cents in most European markets.
Spain is also one of the few countries sticking to plans to close its nuclear plants from 2027. The blackout has revived calls for the lives of nuclear power facilities to be extended — which Sánchez has dismissed.
“There is no empirical evidence to tell us that the incident was caused by a surplus of renewables or a lack of nuclear power plants in Spain,” he said.
Additional reporting by Carmen Muela in Madrid and Ian Johnston in Paris
