23-05-2025
Spain's blackout story is disintegrating
The stench of a cover-up hangs over Spain's giant blackout, the worst electricity failure in any developed country in modern times.
Faith in the current investigation has reached rock-bottom. The socialist government of Pedro Sánchez is trying to buy time with explanations that either make no technical sense or veer into absurdity.
Red Eléctrica, which runs the grid, is accused of stonewalling everybody.
Sources in Brussels have told The Telegraph that the authorities were conducting an experiment before the system crashed, probing how far they could push reliance on renewables in preparation for Spain's rushed phase-out of nuclear reactors from 2027.
The government seems to have pushed the pace recklessly, before making the necessary investments in a sophisticated 21st-century smart grid capable of handling it.
One is reminded of the Chernobyl meltdown in 1985, which began as a test to simulate what happens to a cooling reactor in blackout conditions. Operators ignored warnings that the Number Four reactor had too little power. It set off a cascading failure.
If it is established that the blackout was a controlled experiment that went wrong, and if this information has been withheld from the public for almost four weeks, the Spanish Left faces electoral oblivion for a political generation.
The government has de facto control over Red Eléctrica through a golden share (in breach of EU norms). It put a socialist politician and party loyalist in charge even though she had no experience in the field and faced withering criticism at the time. Her salary in this plum job is six times higher than the Spanish prime minister.
The previous chief resigned in protest over political meddling. He accused the government of pushing its green agenda with 'messianic' zeal – but without taking the accompanying steps needed to pull it off.
The Spanish Association of Electrical Energy Companies (AELEC) has finally lost patience. It came close to calling the whole inquiry a travesty in a caustic statement this week.
How this saga unfolds has ramifications far beyond Spain. Blackouts always raise the ideological temperature in the culture war. Spain's dystopian apagón comes at the moment of peak backlash against all things green in the Western democracies.
Old Energy and the global Right have together seized on the episode to prosecute and convict renewable power before trial, hoping to drive a stake through the heart of net zero.
'Spain reminds us that intermittent energy sources cannot replace the reliable base power provided by fossil fuels or other stable sources,' said Republican senator Steve Daines at a hearing on Capitol Hill this week.
The apagón tells us no such thing. Several countries have a higher share of renewables in the electricity mix without suffering blackouts, including the industrial powerhouse we call Germany. Sen Daines is conflating the issue of intermittency with the separate issue of inertia and grid frequency.
GERMANY CHART
AELEC, which includes Endesa, IBM, Iberdrola and Schneider Electric, said the authorities had inverted the likely chain of causality. It was not the generators that failed to deliver stable power to the grid: it was the grid that failed to manage it and then automatically shut down the generators, whether solar, wind, nuclear or gas.
This is exactly what I had been told earlier by José Donoso, the head of Spain's photovoltaic association. 'We were victims like everybody else. They just cut us off. We still haven't been told anything,' he said.
The solar companies in the southern belt of Badajoz, Granada and Sevilla are indignant at the finger-pointing after the blackout, which insinuated that they had supplied too much power or too little power – the story keeps changing – without ever seeing any evidence for either. Mr Donoso says the solar farms were generating power exactly as programmed on the day of the blackout.
AELEC said the authorities had essentially confined the inquiry to a 20-second span on April 28, wilfully ignoring the elephant in the room: a series of wild oscillations in tension that began days earlier and surpassed 'emergency' levels across the peninsula for two hours leading up to the blackout. The voltage spiked from the normal 220 kilovolts (kV) to extremes of 250kV. This triggered safety shutdowns.
It said the authorities had furnished nothing to substantiate their claim that it all began with a sudden drop of 2.2 gigawatts in power supplied to the grid, and that this in turn set off the chain reaction. The system can handle drops of three gigawatts in any case.
SOLAR CHART
One suspects that the government is trying to deflect attention from its own responsibility: Bank of America says Spain has invested in the grid at a ratio of 0.35 compared to spending on renewables over the last five years, versus 0.8 in Germany and the UK.
'Years of underinvestment have left the grid struggling to keep up,' said Tancrede Fulop, an analyst from Morningstar. The returns allowed by the regulated electricity networks have persistently failed to keep pace with inflation.
Claims have been aired – and denied – that there was a lack of inertia in the grid just before the blackout, causing the frequency to fall below 50 hertz. Gas and nuclear plants retain kinetic energy from spinning rotors for a few seconds after losing power, which provides a critical buffer. Wind and solar do not.
But this has been known for a long time. Modern systems replicate the inertia through other means, such as 'grid-forming' inverters at wind and solar plants. You can install synchronous condensers at substations. Britain has a fleet of flywheels that come to the rescue.
Andries Wantenaar, from Rethink Energy, says none of this is difficult or costs much money. 'Spain was simply negligent,' he said.
Foes of green energy like to mix up the inertia problem with the separate issue of what happens when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. The short-term answer is batteries, cryogenic compressed air and interconnectors. Spain lacks enough of any of them.
We can argue about the answer to longer-term renewable droughts and Dunkelflaute. I am relaxed about using unabated gas to plug the holes and get through deep winter, whether in Spain or the UK. What matters is maintaining broad public consent for decarbonisation, and if we only get to 90pc clean power by the mid-2030s that is still a success.
Absolutism is the enemy.
In the case of Spain, Mr Sánchez might do better to stop waging guerrilla war against his nuclear industry. Foro Nuclear said Spain's seven reactors have an average age of 47 years and could safely be extended to 60 years or longer.
Until we know why the tension went haywire before the blackout, it is impossible to know what really happened, and Mr Sánchez and his friends seem determined to stop us from finding out.
It is the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party that ought to be on political trial in this fiasco. Green energy is the collateral casualty.
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