One year ago last Tuesday, all of Spain and much of Portugal suffered a power outage on an unprecedented scale and duration, when a cascade of events shot through the grid around lunchtime and in minutes all electric power was gone. As the Guardian reports: “traffic signals failed, mobile networks stopped working entirely, petrol stations could not pump fuel and supermarkets could not process payments. Madrid’s metro came to a halt and people had to be pulled out of carriages”. For most people power was restored by the following morning but some had to wait longer.
Solar was initially and incorrectly blamed for the crisis, with media headlines such as “Renewable energy triggered Spain’s blackouts”, “Spain at risk of fresh net zero blackouts” and “Spain power cut caused by solar farm failures”.
But that was not the case. The final report by pan-European grid operator ENTSO-E found the cause had been a “perfect storm” of governance failures relating mainly to voltage. As the Guardian reports, voltage is effectively the “pressure of electricity on the grid, and when it is too high or too low, power lines and generators tend to automatically disconnect”, and this in turn triggered the cascade of failure throughout the grid.
In fact Spain’s grid operator had restricted the extent to which wind and solar generation were allowed to contribute to voltage control, otherwise they could have help to stabilise the system. This has now changed and renewable technologies are now able to contribute to voltage compensation.
Given the extent of energy price increases as a result of the war in Middle East, Spain’s increasing renewable generation has enabled the country to keep prices down and stable. This is part of a wider positive impact on the energy market. Jan Rosenow, Professor of Energy and Climate policy at Oxford University said, “wholesale electricity prices would have been 40% higher in the first half of 2024 without the wind and solar growth of recent years”.
Read the full story in the Guardian here.