Energy Secretary Sticks to Playbook: Blame Renewables for European Blackout

Ready, Fire, Aim.
Above, remembering the Texas Valentine’s Day Blackout of 2021. Immediately blamed on wind turbines. Turns out it was a gas disaster.

E&E News:

Spain and Portugal were still in the dark Monday when U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright went on television to blame a widespread power outage on renewable energy.

“It’s very sad to see what’s happened to Portugal and Spain and so many people there. But you know, when you hitch your wagon to the weather, it’s just a risky endeavor,” Wright told CNBC. 

The remark represented a thinly veiled swipe at wind and solar, which were powering almost three-quarters of the Spanish grid at the time it went dark. The comments stood in contrast to those made by the CEO of the Spanish grid operator, who said no “definitive conclusions” for the outage had been reached.
Grid disasters have become political fodder in recent years, fueling debates over the role of intermittent resources such as wind and solar. 

In 2021, when a winter storm slammed into Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) was quick to blame wind and solar for rolling blackouts that left 4.5 million without power. An investigation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission later concluded the state’s power system was insufficiently winterized to survive such a storm. It pinned much of the blame on the state’s natural gas system, which reported widespread freezes during the event.

“I’ve seen this playbook: Day one, blame renewables. Then the facts come out six months later,” said Michael Webber, a professor who studies the power industry at the University of Texas at Austin. “There’s always more to the story.”

Wright has often taken aim at renewables during his time in office. 

In his welcome remarks to Energy Department staffers, he attributed rising power costs in Europe to solar and wind. A month later, at an industry conference in Houston, he said that wherever wind and solar generation increased, power prices have followed. 

Wright on Monday went on CNBC from Poland, where he had gone to announce a deal to help the country build its first nuclear power plant. He was asked by CNBC anchor Brian Sullivan if the blackout in Spain and Portugal had led to the realization “we’re going to need a lot of power from all different types of sources?”

Wright did not explicitly mention wind and solar in his response, but he claimed Europe’s percentage of global gross domestic product was falling due to “expensive, unreliable energy.” 

“It’s a choice, but it’s a bad choice,” he said.

Andrea Woods, a DOE spokesperson, said Wright was responding to a question about the need to diversify energy supplies. “He was not making an assessment on the cause of the blackout,” she said.

France24:

We don’t know exactly what caused Monday’s fluctuations and eventual failure. 

“There’s a variety of things that usually happen at the same time, and it’s very difficult for any event to say ‘this was the root cause,’” said Eamonn Lannoye, managing director at the Electric Power Research Institute, Europe. 

Lannoye said there was a range of events that can explain grid failures, including that electric grid lines or generators are switched off in some locations for maintenance. 

“This could be a really complex event, I think it’s fair to say,” Lannoye said.

“I think there’s some putting the cart before the horse to say this was solar,” Lannoye said, simply because there was solar power on the grid at the time of the disruption.

Reuters:

REE, which is headed by former Socialist minister Beatriz Corredor, has narrowed down the source of the outage to two separate incidents of loss of generation in substations in southwestern Spain, but says it has yet to identify their exact location and that it is too early to explain what caused them.

In an interview with Cadena SER radio, Corredor said on Wednesday it was wrong to blame the outage on Spain’s high share of renewable energy.

Live Science:

The exact cause of this blackout remains unclear, though representatives of Portugal’s electricity network provider Redes Energéticas Nacionais (REN) said on Monday that it occurred due to a rare phenomenon called “induced atmospheric vibration.”

“Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration,'” REN told the Guardian. “These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”

However, REN has since refuted this explanation, Euronews reports.

“The blackout that hit the entire territory of mainland Portugal today is the result of a significant voltage fluctuation in the Spanish grid at a time when Portugal was importing energy from Spain,” REN said in a statement on Monday afternoon. “With this fluctuation, the control and protection systems of the Portuguese power plants, as expected in a situation with this configuration, shut down, causing the blackout.”

Extreme temperature variations can cause strange oscillations in very high voltage power lines, physically moving back and forth. This is due to temperature changes causing the lines to expand in some places, changing tension in the lines, altering their aerodynamic properties, and interacting with wind and electrical current, which can physically and electrically destabilize the power system.

“Although investigations are ongoing, some early media reports are mentioning a phenomenon known as ‘”induced atmospheric vibration'” linked to unusual atmospheric conditions, including rapid temperature variations and resulting wind patterns in the interior of Spain,” Victor Becerra, a professor of power systems engineering at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., said in a statement.

“If these conditions have been in place they may have triggered abnormal oscillations in very high-voltage power lines,” Becerra said.

This can snap conductors, short circuits or damage infrastructure like transmission towers.

“Protection systems are designed to automatically disconnect affected power lines in response to such faults,” Becerra said.

Then, a kind of domino effect occurs, with the shutoffs causing instability and disconnection in some generators. “The loss of large generators can create a sudden and significant imbalance between power supply and demand in the power grid, potentially escalating into widespread outages,” Becerra said.

The exact cause of the blackouts has not been confirmed, however, and some others have suggested that it could have been the result of a cyber attack. There is no evidence to suggest that this is the case, Senior European Commission vice-president Teresa Ribera told Spain’s Radio 5 on Monday. On Tuesday (April 29), Eduardo Prieto, the head of services for Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica’s told the Guardian that they had ruled out a cybersecurity incident.

Regardless of the initial cause, such a large region was affected because European power grids are highly interconnected. Usually, that allows for greater reliability, with other grids providing backup if a local issue arises. But it also leaves the entire system vulnerable to large failures propagating across a much greater area.