A green blackout?

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BrusselsReport.eu
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On Monday 28th, around noon, the electric grids in Spain and Portugal went down, also affecting parts of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland and Finland. The outage affected major metropolitan areas such as Madrid and Lisbon with Frankfurt airport also being impacted. Only the Atlantic archipelagos (Canary islands, the Azores and Madeira) escaped the crisis and France’s transmission system operator RTE was able to quickly restore power in the country’s south.

Hospitals and public transports were affected and all major events were suspended, with electricity grid operators Red Electrica, Endesa and REN working overtime to reestablish the grid.

The authorities have not yet indicated a cause but cabinet meetings are underway in the two countries and sources at MIBEL (the Iberian integrated energy market) expressed similar befuddlement.
The only certainty seems to be that the problem originated in Spain, following an unusual spike in consumption. Early speculation of a cyber attack from Russia have since been debunked by Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica.

“Cash is King”

Nevertheless, there were moments of panic in subways, trains and elevators, as well as widespread chaos in airports. Long queues formed to access ATM machines as electronic payments came to a halt.

Consumers rushed to buy flashlights, candles, canned goods, toilet paper and water.

Previously, the Iberian peninsula has mostly avoided the kind of energy disruptions that has affected central and eastern Europe, since Spain has an above average LNG storage capacity and since Spain and Portugal have diverse sources of supply, from French nuclear energy, over North African natural gas to oil supplies from sub-Saharan Africa. Nonetheless, Portugal’s previous socialist government’s decision to close all coal-powered power plants is now likely to face more scrutiny.

The “Chernobyl moment” for renewables?

The Iberian experience is triggering a European-wide debate on the impact of the so-called “energy transition”, which comes with heavy state subsidies for solar and wind power.

In response, British campaign group NetZeroWatch stated:

“With more than 50 million EU electricity consumers suffering blackouts yesterday, campaign group Net Zero Watch has reiterated its warning that the UK power grid is also becoming increasingly unstable.

Grid analysts have suggested a high likelihood that the extent of yesterday’s blackout in Iberia was a result of the Spanish grid operating almost entirely on renewables at the time. The stability of power grids depends on so-called ‘inertia’, a resistance to rapid change that is an inherent feature of large spinning turbines, such as gas-fired power stations, but not of wind and solar farms. Too much renewables capacity on a grid can therefore mean inadequate inertia. As a result, in grids dominated by wind and solar, faults can propagate almost instantaneously across grids, leading to blackouts.”

Policy analyst Ralph Schoellhammer commented: “This could very well be the Chernobyl moment for renewables (i.e. wind and solar).”

Martien Visser, a Dutch academic specialised in the energy transition, highlighted how “between 2017 and 2025, the share of solar + wind in the EU electricity mix doubled from 15% to 30%.”

Damien Ernst, a Belgian Professor in Electrical and Engineering commented:

“Too few synchronous generators were operational in Spain because the country was relying heavily on renewable energy production prior to the blackout.

The remaining synchronous generators accelerated rapidly due to the excess power.

These generators reached their speed limit and were disconnected by overspeed protection mechanisms before other control systems could restore the balance between power production and consumption.” 

Spanish daily El Mundo wrote:

“All fingers point to solar power, whose massive entry into the system during the middle of the day is causing extremely unstable situations in the grid which put Red Electrica (…) in trouble. The state-owned company protected itself from the market two months ago against an event like this, recognizing the ‘short-term risk’ of ‘generation disconnections due to the high penetration of renewables’.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s energy commentator Javier Blas called the experience “the first big blackout of the green electricity era”, however adding that “there were many — really, many — blackouts during the “fossil fuel electricity era,” when coal-fired power plants were the backbone of the grid. Lesson would be learnt of what happened in Spain, and grids will be hardened everywhere.”

Ironically, this week, the Dutch “Ministry of Climate and Green Growth” also just started a campaign to deal with the congestion on the power grid,  calling on people throughout the Netherlands to use as little power as possible between 16:00 and 21:00.

Miguel Nunes Silvais the Director of Portugese think tank Trezeno Institute, and a local councilman affiliated with Portugal’s third largest political party. 

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