Renewable energy in the dock in Spain after blackout

Fierce debate raged in Spain on Wednesday over the function its reliance on renewable power could have had on this week’s blackout which disrupted tens of millions of lives, although officers sought to downplay any potential hyperlink.

“The shortage of nuclear power stations and the ‘growth’ in renewables have introduced the electrical energy grid to its knees,” conservative newspaper ABC headlined on its entrance web page.

Rival each day El Mundo wrote that “warnings about renewables over the last five years” had been “ignored.”

Conservative opposition events have additionally questioned Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s push to make Spain a inexperienced power champion within the wake of Monday’s power outage which halted trains, trapped individuals in elevators and plunged cities into darkness within the nation and neighboring Portugal.

Photo voltaic and wind power accounted for nearly 40% of Spain’s electrical energy final yr, twice as a lot as in 2014, based on electrical energy operator REE.

Against this the share of electrical energy generated by nuclear energy fell to twenty% in 2024, with the federal government aiming to section out its atomic energy vegetation by 2035.

Questions in regards to the resilience of this combine started to be raised after it emerged that REE’s father or mother firm, Redeia, warned in its 2024 monetary report that “the high penetration of renewable generation without the necessary technical capacity to deal adequately with disturbances” may “lead to production cuts.”

These blackouts “could become severe, even leading to an imbalance between production and demand, which would significantly affect the electricity supply,” it added within the report printed in February.

‘Labored completely’

This message was echoed in a January report by Spain’s competitors watchdog CNMC which mentioned the voltage on the electricity grid had generally “reached maximum values close to the authorized thresholds, and have even exceeded them at certain times.”

After the blackout, specialists questioned if an imbalance between electricity production and demand—which is tougher to right with out the correct expertise in a grid with important wind and solar power generation—may have led to the collapse of the system.

However Redeia president Beatriz Corredor—a former Socialist lawmaker—mentioned renewable power manufacturing “is secure,” including throughout an interview with information radio Cadena Ser on Wednesday it was “wrong” to hyperlink it to the blackout.

Redeia’s 380-page annual monetary report was merely itemizing a sequence of potential dangers as required by legislation, she mentioned.

Requested in regards to the controversy, Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen mentioned Wednesday the reason for the blackout was nonetheless unknown and it was “imprudent to speculate.”

“The system has worked perfectly well with similar demand and a comparable energy mix. Consequently, pointing the finger at renewables… does not seem appropriate,” she added, calling Spain’s community “robust.”

‘Ignorance’

Sanchez on Tuesday defended his authorities’s power mannequin and pressured that the reason for the outage was not but identified.

“Those who link this incident to the lack of nuclear power are frankly lying or demonstrating their ignorance,” he informed a information convention.

“Nuclear power plants, far from being a solution, have been a problem” through the blackout as a result of “it was necessary to divert large amounts of energy to them to keep their cores stable,” Sanchez mentioned.

Spain’s electrical energy community misplaced 15 gigawatts of electrical energy era—the equal of 60% of the nation’s electrical energy consumption on the time—in simply 5 seconds on Monday at round 12:33 pm (1033 GMT).

Spain’s high felony court docket mentioned Tuesday it’s investigating whether or not the blackout was “an act of computer sabotage” however REE has dominated out a cyberattack.

It has as a substitute recognized as a potential reason behind the blackout two separate incidents only one and a half seconds aside, one which can have affected solar energy manufacturing in southwest Spain.

However REE pressured it’s “not possible to draw any conclusions” at this stage.

© 2025 AFP