Study: Spain’s Blackout Not Caused by Renewables

In case you were wondering.

NPR:

Last spring, tens of millions of people lost electricity across Spain, Portugal and part of France. Trains stopped in their tracks, and people were stuck in elevators, as southwestern Europe went without power for — in some cases — more than ten hours.

Immediately, the finger-pointing began. Many people blamed solar and wind energy. Spain, one of Europe’s front runners in renewable energy, gets about 46% of its power from solar and wind, according to the think tank Ember— sometimes more than 70%.

In the hours after the outage The Daily Mailpublished the headline “Could renewable energy be to blame for huge Spain blackout?”

And on the day of the outage U.S. energy secretary and former fracking executive Chris Wright went on CNBC to talk about the outage and criticized solar and wind. “When you hitch your wagon to the weather,” Wright said, “it’s just a risky endeavor.”

The idea that solar and wind are inherently risky and unreliable is a common talking point for critics of renewable energy, often repeated by groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry. It’s false. When renewable energy is paired with large batteries or other forms of grid management, it’s proven to be reliable.

Now a new report from an expert panel of European grid operators details what happened. The report finds that for the first time in Europe, a voltage surge caused the massive outage. Voltage needs to remain within limits for an electrical grid to work. While many things went wrong, the problem was not a power grid with too much wind or solar, says Chris Rosslowe, a senior energy analyst at Ember who was not involved in drafting the report.

“It contradicts the numerous claims that we’ve seen that an overreliance on renewables was the cause,” Rosslowe says. “That is clearly not true.”

But the misinformation about solar and wind energy causing the outage has had an impact. A new survey found that a majority of Spanish respondentsbelieve at least one false narrative about the blackout, and the most common was that too much reliance on renewable energy was to blame.

Countries around the world are using renewable energy to move away from polluting fossil fuels. That’s why it’s so important to counter false narratives about solar and wind, says Philip Newell, communications co-chair of the Climate Action Against Disinformation, a coalition of nonprofits.

“This content makes it seem more normal and feel more normal to hate on renewables,” Newell says. “Even though they’re a solution to climate change.”

The new report from the European grid operators’ expert panel found multiple triggers shortly before the blackout.

First, oscillations, or sudden swings in power flow, hit the grid. It’s still unclear what caused them. Spain’s main grid operator took steps to control the oscillations, including sending less power to France. While these actions helped dampen the oscillations, they caused the voltage to surge upwards.

Voltage is like pressure in a water system. Just like it’s key to have a certain amount of pressure for water to flow, there needs to be a certain amount of voltage to push electrons through a circuit. But voltage can’t be too high, or it can cause short circuits or even fires.

When the voltage surged, transformers and power plants shut down. Antonio Gómez-Expósito, electrical engineering professor at University of Seville, says the outage shows that Spain needs more regulations around controlling voltage.

The expert panel report, like other recent analyses from Spain’s governmentand main grid operator, does not indicate that reliance on solar or wind power led to the outage. The panel will issue a final report next year.

When critics of renewable energy pointed the finger at solar or wind for causing the blackout, many used one word: inertia.

Michael Shellenberger, a longtime critic of renewable energy and proponent of nuclear power with 1.4 million followers on X, said in a post the day of the blackout, “Renewables don’t risk blackouts, said the media. But they did and they do… it’s clear that too little ‘inertia’ due to excess solar resulted in system collapse.”

Inertia is important to the electrical grid because it can help stabilize sudden fluctuations in a grid’s frequency. Power plants that run on gas, coal or nuclear use large spinning turbines that create electricity and have inertia. More modern power resources, like wind, solar, and batteries, don’t involve inertia, because they are digitally controlled. “Wind and solar plants either have no inertia or very little,” Gómez-Expósito says, “but in return, they have infinitely greater response speeds.”

There is no indication that a lack of inertia was the cause of the outage, Gómez-Expósito says. Spain’s main grid operator, Red Eléctrica, released a report about the outage this summer. “The incident was not caused by an inertia problem,” it said in a press release.

Red Eléctrica

The analysis focuses on what occurred after 12:00 PM that Monday, since, although various frequent operational events are reported before that time, the available data show that these were neither significant nor the cause of what happened subsequently. Based on this premise, the report, which can be consulted on the Red Eléctrica website, concludes that before 12:03 PM, the system was within acceptable voltage and frequency limits.

From that moment, the operator describes a sequence of several significant events that led to the system’s collapse: two “forced” oscillations triggered by potential internal anomalies in a generation plant and three missed generation events caused by defective trips. The analysis of all these events has enabled the operator to draw a series of conclusions, which have been grouped into various areas:
 

• System Voltage: It was observed that the disconnection of generation which triggered the incident was incorrect, as plants were outside the voltage range determined for these actions under current regulations (P.O. 1.1 and ORDEN TED/749/2020).
   
• Voltage control:
  • The SO’s analysis concluded that the generation currently subject to P.O. 7.4 (which requires dynamic voltage regulation) did not comply with the established obligations. So, on 28 April, it did not absorb the reactive power as required. It is essential to note that on 28 April, like any other day, the SO made the requisite calculations and the relevant decisions regarding the programming of technical restrictions, always assuming that all groups satisfied the technical provisions outlined in the regulations.
  • Moreover, it is evident that the resources of the transmission grid available to the SO for voltage control, such as reactors and capacitors, operated correctly. However, as static elements, they are unsuitable instruments for offsetting the absence of dynamic control that certain groups must perform in accordance with the applicable regulations
• Frequency and inertia: The incident was not caused by an inertia problem; it is explained by the balancing of reactive power (voltage control), rather than active power (frequency control). However, on 28 April, the system’s inertia value was higher than the Entso-e recommendation. The reason for this was that the groups connected through technical restrictions were sufficient to meet demand, provide inertia, enable energy flow control, and offer resources for dynamic voltage control on the transmission grid.

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Meanwhile, Germany’s mostly renewable grid is 5x as stable as the US (last time I checked) and keeps getting better.

Bundesnetsagentur:

The Bundesnetzagentur has today published figures on interruptions to the electricity supply in 2024. The non-availability of electricity averaged 11.7 minutes per final customer. In 2023 it had been 12.8 minutes.

“The electricity supply in Germany is still very stable. The energy transition is making headway without any loss of reliable electricity supply,” said Klaus Müller, President of the Bundesnetzagentur.

Even when taking energy transition measures into account, the figures on interruptions to the electricity supply in 2024 do not reflect any negative trends in terms of long-term interruptions. The current figure is below the level of the 10-year average (interruption duration of 12.7 minutes per final customer). A comparison with neighbouring countries also shows that Germany’s electricity grid remains one of Europe’s most reliable.