The unprecedented blackout that brought the Iberian peninsula to a standstill at the end of April was caused by surging voltages triggering “a chain reaction of disconnections” that shut down the power network, an expert report commissioned by the Spanish government has found.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday afternoon, the country’s environment minister, Sara Aagesen, ruled out a cyber-attack as the cause of the outage on 28 April, saying it had been down to a “multifactorial” system failure caused by the network’s inability to control grid voltage.
Aagesen said the blackout had a “multifactorial origin … In other words, it was caused by the confluence of a combination of factors. The cause of the zero [-power event] was a phenomenon of surging tensions [and] a chain reaction of control disconnections that cause further disconnections.”
The expert investigations focused on what happened at 12.33pm on Monday 28 April when, for five seconds, 15GW of the energy being produced – equivalent to 60% of all the energy being used – suddenly disappeared.
Aagesen said the research had uncovered “voltage instability” on the morning of the blackout and in the days leading up to it, followed by “oscillations” in the system between noon and 12.30pm that day.
“A second phase saw power losses, and a third phase led to the peninsular collapse,” she added.
The minister said the report’s key recommendations included strengthening supervision and compliance, and ensuring that Spain was properly protected against future voltage fluctuations.
She defended the socialist-led government’s commitment to increased use of renewable energy, which some had sought to portray as the cause of the blackout.
“We have a solid narrative of events and a verified explanation that allows us to reflect and to act as we surely will,” said Aagesen. “We believe in the energy transition and we know it’s not an ideological question but one of this country’s principal vectors of growth when it comes to re-industrialisation opportunities.”
Aagesen and the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, have repeatedly rejected any suggestion that the blackout had been caused by the rush to abandon nuclear power in favour of renewables. “Those who link this incident to the lack of nuclear power are frankly lying or demonstrating their ignorance,” Sánchez said the day after the power cut, adding that nuclear power generation “was no more resilient” than other electricity sources.
Aagesen had also previously said that Spain’s electricity on the day in question was generated from a tried-and-tested mix of different sources, with solar power accounting for almost 55% of the total, followed by 10% from wind power, 10% from nuclear power and almost 10% from hydro power.
“The system has worked to perfection with a similar demand situation and with a similar energetic mix [in the past], so pointing the finger at renewables when the system has functioned perfectly in the same context doesn’t seem very appropriate,” she said at the time.
The government and the president of Red Eléctrica have also denied media reports that the failure was caused by a government experiment with renewable energy production on the day of the blackout. “That’s entirely false,” the operator’s president, Beatriz Corredor, told La Vanguardia last month. “It’s a cathedral-sized piece of fake news.”
Spain’s blackout wasn’t because of renewables, eh?
Just like US Northeast blackout of 1965, the NYC blackout of 1977 or the US Northeast blackout of 2003.
I believe the technical term for problems like this is shit happens.
‘It didn’t collapse last time we tried it, so it can’t possibly have been too much wind and solar.’ Methinks they doth protest too much. The breakdown started in Spain’s south-west, a region heavily dominated by wind and solar – as is Portugal’s grid, just over the border. Spain normally gets about 20% of its power from nuclear, the ultimate in synchronous power, but on the day in question, half the reactors were shut down – there was too much inertia-free renewable power available. Once the wave of shut-downs began, it swept straight over the border and took out the Portuguese grid, but stopped at the French border. France on the day was getting 66% of its power from nuclear, and another 11% from hydro, representing thousands of tonnes of fast-spinning iron. The beat stayed at 50 hertz, as designed.
The Spanish prime minister complained that the nuclear reactors were just as slow to get restarted as the rest of the grid. That’s immaterial – they can be configured to go into ‘island’ mode, and in future, very likely will be. In any case, since the blackout, the reactors have been running much closer to full power. So has gas – probably to deal with the heat waves it’s helping to cause.
Michael Liebreich explains very clearly that renewables’ other weakness, long lulls (‘Dunkelflauten’) can’t be solved by batteries, and he’s on record as being very dismissive of the chances for ‘green’ stored hydrogen doing so, either. The giant Waartsila two-stroke gas diesels he commends in the video are also unlikely to keep northern Europe’s grid clean through the winter. They’re faster to start than combined cycle gas turbines, which take time to warm up their second-stage steam boilers, but they also use a bit more gas per kilowatt/hour. Liebreich is touting an undersea cable to bring wind and solar power generated in Morocco direct to the United Kingdom, for power when British solar panels and wind turbines are beclouded and becalmed. Why give an instant off switch for your economy to the government of Morocco, or to any malign operator who can drag an anchor across your cable, when you can build low carbon, reliable nuclear at home? The current Labour government agrees – they’re giving no funding to the proposed $33 billion, 3.6 gigawatt ‘X-links’ cable, instead planning on increasing nuclear generation from 6 at present to 24 gigawatts by 2050.