Energy: intensely political

By Richard North - May 1, 2025

Before we get sucked into the vortex of today’s election results, I thought I’d stay with the Spanish (or Iberian) blackouts, following the developments in a story which has at its roots complex technical issues, but which also has intensely political dimensions.

Days into the aftermath, we’re actually no closer to a definitive version of what caused the blackouts, and that has become part of the story with a socialist government anxious to deflect blame and seeking to avoid criticism for the renewables policy to which many are pointing as the cause.

One of the key media inputs yesterday came from the Spanish journal, the right of centre El Mundo, with a bold headline declaring: “Five years of ignored warnings about the risk of blackouts due to the massive introduction of renewable energy put Beatriz Corredor’s management in the spotlight”.

Beatriz Corredor is a former socialist minister and now president of Red Eléctrica, the partly state-owned grid operator – and a dyed-in-the wool renewables enthusiast. She is potentially badly damaged by El Mundo revealing that internal studies by the company had warned in 2020 that in Spain it was “essential” to increase storage capacity or interconnections to “ensure the operability” of the grid in the green transition.

That Corredor is in trouble comes from the left-leaning El País, which has a bundle of articles as its lead items. The most prominent is that headed: “The Government demands data from the electricity companies now and timidly supports Corredor”.

This points to the difficulty the government is experiencing as electricity companies delay submitting vital data, while both energy minister Sara Aagesen – who is heading an inquiry into the blackout – and government spokesman, Pilar Alegría, have offered tepid support to Corredor, expressly avoiding supporting her.

Corredor, we are told in a separate article is determined to defend the role of renewables, declaring that it is “incorrect” to link them to the blackouts, while claiming that the national electricity system is the “best in Europe”. She argues that the event which brought down the grid was “impossible to predict”.

In a third article, we see the headline statement that “Renewable energy is in the spotlight due to a blackout whose causes are still unknown”, with the sub-head telling us: “Experts argue that mass production with these technologies in Spain is not a problem if investments and adjustments are made”.

Currently, Corredor is asserting that “zero risk doesn’t exist”. Telling us to “just ask France or Italy, which have had similar problems”, she continues to claim that the blackout was not Red Eléctrica’s fault, asserting that “there was no incident in the network prior to the failure or anything that could have caused a blackout”.

She also claims that “We’ve also seen afterward that everything was working correctly; if there was any extraordinary incident, it wasn’t on our network, adding: “It is not true that nuclear power is more secure for supply, nor that renewables make the system more vulnerable”.

This underlines the intense controversy raging over the causes, which are still being investigated. Until today, the most complete explanation had come from Eduardo Prieto, director of services for Red Eléctrica’s operations.

Based on the preliminary data available to the operator, he ruled out a cyberattack and added: “Nothing leads us to believe it was human error”. In common with the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet), he also ruled out the possibility of extreme weather or an atmospheric event being behind this incident.

Prieto said the preliminary investigation pointed to a loss of photovoltaic generation in the southwest of the Peninsula, which he says brought down the entire system. Its trigger and magnitude were still being investigated.

However, following his statement, up popped prime minister Pedro Sánchez who refused to rule out any cause for the blackout and announced two independent investigations would be carried out: one led by the Ministry for Ecological Transition and another by Brussels.

However, Prieto had pointed to two consecutive “generation disconnection” events, which occurred at 12:33 p.m., as the primary cause, which led to the chain of failures that ultimately brought down the grid across the entire Peninsula, stating flatly: “The system wasn’t able to survive”.

Piecing together the events, at 12.33pm, the grid experiences an “event” that appeared to be a loss of generation, at which point the frequency suddenly dropped, from the 50 hertz level to 49 hertz.

Almost immediately, the grid self-stabilised. Then, 1.5 seconds later there was a second similar of loss of generation and, at 5 seconds the resultant instability led to the automatic disconnection of the Spain-France connection and the isolation of the peninsula.

At that moment, two key questions remained unanswered: what caused these drops in generation? Why were the grid and power plants unable to respond to compensate for the disruption?

In this morning’s edition, though, El Mundo adds more detail, completely contradicting Corredor’s assertions as to the cause. This tells us that half an hour before the blackout, the system was experiencing “critical anomalies” – data ascertained from telemetry recorded by “black boxes” shared by Red Eléctrica and the distribution companies.

This telemetry shows that there were “simultaneous” frequency fluctuations in several parts of the country, from Extremadura to Valencia and Zaragoza, with measurements showing that the network situation was “permanently unstable” as early as 10:00 am.

Furthermore, on the day of the blackout, the complete system failure prompted a series of cries of “it’s happened, it’s happened” from one of the regulatory agencies. The reaction stemmed from instability that, apparently, had been developing since the previous week.

This is traced back to Tuesday 22 April – the day after solar set a new record, generating 20.12 GW of instantaneous power, covering 78.6 percent of demand and 61.5 percent of the grid mix. Then, voltage disturbances occurred in the system that “brought it close to the point of blackout”. Although the anomalies had visible effects, causing disruptions to refinery operations and train services, they did not raise the operator’s alarm bells.

All sources informing El Mundo now agree that the evidence and measurements indicate that the system had operated for several days in “an extreme situation” in terms of stability parameters: “The electrical system acted according to its protection systems, which triggered when the tolerable oscillation margins were exceeded” – thus explaining why the generators tripped out.

While there is agreement that other factors may have converged and stressed the system, the sources are adamant that the system would have faced them with “minimal capacity to react” due to the excessive burden of unmanageable energy.

Before these latest revelations, Reuters had picked up the story, heading its report: “Spain’s grid denies solar at fault as blackout blame game erupts”. It tells us that, while Sánchez was coming under increasing pressure to explain what went wrong, his opponents pointed the finger at low investment in a system that increasingly relies on intermittent solar and wind power.

The critics are supported by an array of experts, one of whom is Antonio Turiel, an energy expert at the state-owned Spanish National Research Council. He asserts that the fundamental problem was the grid’s instability.

“A lot of renewable energy has been integrated without the responsive stabilisation systems that should have been in place”, he says, adding that vulnerabilities stemmed from “the unplanned and haphazard integration of a host of renewable systems”.

Then there is Jordi Sevilla, Red Eléctrica’s chair until 2020. He wrote in an opinion piece in Cinco Dias newspaper, complaining that the government was moving too fast to decommission nuclear power plants that could provide stable generation to offset the peaks and troughs of intermittent renewable energy.

The government’s plan for investing in the grid “was planned from an office, with too much renewable messianism and turning a deaf ear to the technical problems associated with such an important change in Spain’s energy mix”, he wrote.

More background on the nuclear issue comes from an online piece written by Alfredo García who calls himself a nuclear energy educator.

He notes that Sánchez, under questioning about the role of nuclear powerin the blackout, asserted that the plants which had tripped out made the situation worse. Garcia accuses him of lying, pointing out that the nuclear plants provide inertia to the electrical system, helping to avoid blackouts in the face of frequency oscillations, such as the one that occurred yesterday.

At the time of the blackout, he says, half the nuclear capacity was shut down, largely due to low electricity prices and a disproportionate tax burden on nuclear power, which had increased by 71 percent. The absence of these plants, authorised by Red Eléctrica, meant that there was not enough firm power from synchronous generators that could have avoided the blackout.

Some clarity, therefore, is beginning to emerge from the fog, although we are a long way yet from a definitive explanation. Further understanding is not helped, according to The Times, by companies mindful of potential legal claims that may amount to tens of millions of euros. This may explain why they are reluctant to provide information to government.

As for the British media, what is remarkable is how quickly, from dominating the front pages, the issue has slid down the batting order. The Guardian and the BBC are not even covering the investigation, contenting themselves with soft-focus pieces about the effects of power cuts.

One can bet that if the blackouts had been cause by “weather events” or anything that could have been remotely attributed to “global boiling”, both organisations would have been giving the issue saturation coverage. As it is now raising uncomfortable questions about the use of renewables and grid resilience, they have gone silent.

The implications for the UK are obvious. And overcoming the problems that have blighted the Iberian system are going to cost us a shed-load of money, with rises in our electricity bills already in the pipeline.

Nevertheless, while keeping quiet about the problems, the Guardian thinks that the green transition can deliver a vote-winning combination of economic growth and environmental sustainability.

The paper refers to a notably bullish speech last week when Starmer doubled down on the net-zero madness, telling an energy summit that he saw renewable energy as core to UK’s future prosperity and national security

Small wonder, the paper doesn’t want to know about the downside. It thinks this madness is “good politics as well as morally right”. Blackouts, it would seem, are good for the soul.