23-05-2025
Spain's socialist authorities ‘were experimenting with how far they could push reliance on renewable energy' before country suffered huge power blackout
Spanish authorities had been experimenting with how far they could push their reliance on renewable energy before the Iberian Peninsula suffered a massive power outage last month, it has been suggested.
As people wait for answers about what caused the dystopian power cut that disrupted tens of millions of lives across Spain and Portugal, several have questioned Spain's heavy reliance on renewable energy sources as it plans to phase out nuclear reactors.
Spain's socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has rejected such criticism, asking for patience while the government investigates the causes of the historic blackout.
Now, it has been suggested that Spain's government was carrying out an experiment before the country's grid system crashed, The Telegraph reports.
Under said test, authorities had been trialling how far they could push their reliance on renewables as they prepared for Spain's phase-out of nuclear reactors from 2027.
At the time of the outage, Spain's electric grid operator Red Eléctrica de España said the blackout had been cause by two significant interruptions in power.
The Spanish Association of Electrical Energy Companies (Aelec), which has criticised the inquiry into the blackout's cause, said it was not the country's generators that failed to deliver power to the grid, but rather it was the grid that failed to manage it and then shut down automatically.
The head of Spain's photovoltaic association, Jose Donoso, had made a similar suggestion earlier this month, telling newsoutlet 20Minutos: 'It's a matter of logic; the fact that the entire system goes down because of a photovoltaic plant makes no sense.'
'We suffered the consequences of a grid disruption, but we didn't cause it.'
But Aelec has said the authorities had essentially confined the trial to a 20-second span on April 28, and ignored a series of 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, which triggered safety shutdowns as a result.
Aelec added that the authorities did not substantiate their claim that it all began with a sudden drop of 2.2 gigawatts in power supplied to the grid, which they claim set off the chain reaction.
It comes after the sweeping power outage that hit Spain and Portugal last month raised questions about the electricity grid in a region not normally known for blackouts.
The outage, said to be one of the worst ever in Europe, started on the afternoon of April 28 and lasted through nightfall, affecting tens of millions of people across the European Peninsula.
It disrupted businesses, hospitals, transit systems, cellular networks and other critical infrastructure.
Spain generated nearly 57% of its electricity in 2024 from renewable energy sources like wind, hydropower and solar, according to Red Eléctrica, the country's grid operator.
About 20% came from nuclear power plants.
In 2019, Sánchez's government approved a plan to decommission the country's remaining nuclear reactors between 2027 and 2035 as it expands its share of renewable energy even further.
The country aims to generate 81% of its electricity by 2030 from renewable sources.
