Spain’s power and information blackout

Welcome back. Spain and Portugal suffered a catastrophic power outage on Monday, bringing both countries to a sudden halt.

The Iberian peninsula is something of an energy island, with few connections to European grids. But with its abundance of wind and sunshine, the region is at the vanguard of efforts to decarbonise power systems. A failure there has potentially huge implications for the energy transition in the rest of Europe, arguably the biggest industrial, economic and societal transformation for decades — one that is being increasingly contested politically. For critics of net zero policies and the shift to renewables it was a gift.

Many experts have rebutted claims that the rise in solar and wind power per se is to blame. But as the FT’s editorial board observed, such a systemic grid collapse should serve as a wake-up call for governments everywhere to bolster network resilience. I’m at ben.hall@ft.com.

Radio silence

The blackout caused massive disruption and for some people distress, shutting businesses, stranding travellers and cutting off mobile communications. Spaniards once again showed the impressive civismo or public spiritedness that characterised their handling of the pandemic and the catastrophic flood in Valencia last year. For some, it offered a brief journey back in time to the pre-digital age, with analogue radio the only source of information. Battery-powered sets quickly sold out in stores in Madrid.

The lights mostly came back on in the early hours of Tuesday. But Spaniards, Portuguese and their European neighbours were left in the dark for days about the causes of the outage.

Blame game

In Spain’s highly polarised political climate, it was not surprising that the leftwing government led by prime minister Pedro Sánchez would take the blame. It has accelerated the renewables rollout and is planning to phase out nuclear power from 2027.

After the Valencia floods, Sánchez’s government and the opposition conservative People’s Party, which runs the regional government, attacked each other for failing to warn residents of the impending deluge.

This week Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the PP leader, criticised the government’s “information blackout” and said the nuclear phase out plan would make Spain’s energy supply more unstable. Santiago Abascal, the leader of the hard-right Vox party, demanded the government abandon its “climate fanaticism”. He and other Vox figures have mischievously pointed out that the blackout hit shortly after a judge in Badajoz said she would be pressing charges against the prime minister’s brother David for abuse of public office.

The prime minister has meanwhile pinned the responsibility on Spain’s private-sector energy companies, including Red Eléctrica, which operates the high-voltage grid. Electricity generators including Iberdrola have said it is up to RE to explain what went wrong. RE in turn has blamed the generators.

Beatriz Corredor, RE’s chair and a longtime friend and political ally of Sanchez, gave a round of interviews defending the operator, saying it had done nothing wrong. Its rapid reconnection of the entire grid proved it was the “best” network operator in Europe, she claimed. In terms of corporate communications, it was as tone-deaf as it gets. Whatever the original cause of the blackout, RE did not prevent the whole power supply collapsing which is its job. Punto.

Inertia good and bad

Many experts believe the grid’s inability to manage a predominance of solar energy in the supply mix on Monday was the reason for the grid’s collapse. My colleague Ian Johnston spoke to some of them in this piece and here’s our explainer earlier in the week.

In a nutshell, a sudden and unexplained drop off in supply to the grid shortly after 12.30pm caused the grid’s frequency to drop below the required 50hz and the voltage to surge. The operator normally uses the inertia of spinning turbines in conventional power plants to balance the frequency. But for some reason, it appears, it did not have enough of what the experts call “rolling synchronous capacity” to do the job before the system tripped out.

For a more detailed account of what probably happened, see this interview with Jorge Sanz, a leading former Spanish energy official and International Energy Agency board member, for the website Ethic (in Spanish). Ed Conway of Sky News illustrates the importance of inertia to power grids in this thread on X.

These are complex and technical issues and, as experts warn, it is easy to jump to the wrong conclusions. Is Spain really endangering Europe’s energy security with its “over-reliance” on intermittent solar and wind? Or does it just lack adequate tools for managing those sources?

Alongside keeping some conventional turbine capacity, grids should be investing in technologies to keep the power supply stable, including artificial intelligence. Batteries can provide instant balancing, but according to this report for El Confidencial (in Spanish) Spain is years behind other countries in installing battery storage.

Antonio Cabarga, an electrical systems engineer, pointed out on LinkedIn that it is relatively easy for renewable power installations to put in place frequency inverters, which can provide “synthetic inertia” to the grid, mimicking turbines. But Spanish regulation does not yet allow it to be used, he said.

Governments do not pay enough attention to upgrading power networks, perhaps because it means acknowledging that there are additional costs to the renewables rollout. To its credit, the European Commission has been banging the drum on this for some time. Its 2023 grid action plan noted that 40 per cent of Europe’s network infrastructure is more than 40 years old and with the planned doubling of cross-border interconnections by 2030, it would need €584bn in new investment.

Mario Draghi’s competitiveness report also underscored the importance of investing in grids and in cross-border interconnectors. More extensive power links with France may not have prevented Monday’s blackout but could help to make power supply more stable and more efficient.

Governments and grid operators across Europe will now come under pressure to show they are doing everything necessary to ensure that a blackout on this scale does not happen again otherwise voters may lose confidence in the green transition.

More on this topic

The great grid crisis — a deep dive by Rachel Millard in London, Jamie Smyth in New York and Ian Johnston in Paris

Ben’s pick of the week

Maltese “golden” passports were sold to Russians with Ukraine war links by Laura Dubois