Spanish government’s green targets blamed for causing national blackouts
Spain forced the use of renewables before the blackout that paralysed the Iberian peninsula last month, a report has claimed.
The Socialist-led government of Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister, ordered the national grid operator, Red Electrica, to intensify the use of renewable energy a week before the power failure “in order to present itself to Europe as a pioneer country” in the field, the conservative newspaper ABC claimed.
The response was immediate, it added, saying that “unstable programmes” were launched, forcing the system on different days to demonstrate how far it could go by feeding as much renewable energy into the grid as possible.
The government of Pedro Sánchez is accused of ordering the grid operator to intensify the use of renewables a week before the failure
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• What caused the power failure in Spain and Portugal?
Last year renewables contributed 56 per cent of Spain’s total electricity mix but the target is to reach 81 per cent by 2030. The report said that on April 28, the day of the blackout, at 12.30pm, the energy mix showed 72.66 per cent renewable generation.
A government spokesman strongly denied the claims, saying “no order was given for any experiment or so-called unstable programmes”. Spain’s right-wing opposition has tried to link the power cut to the government’s “green energy ideology”.
A month after the Iberian blackout, its cause remains a mystery. The power cut, one of the worst in Europe in recent years, started in the afternoon and lasted into the night, affecting tens of millions of people across Spain and Portugal. It disrupted businesses, hospitals, transport systems, mobile phone networks and other critical infrastructure.
Noting that on the morning of the power cut there had been “oscillations and frequency imbalances in the network”, the chief of one of Spain’s energy giants said last week that “probably they [the grid operator] were operating at the limits of the technical parameters of the network”.
Travellers stranded at Lisbon airport during the blackout
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In 2023 the grid operator warned that “urgent measures” were needed to avoid power cuts due to overvoltage generated in the electricity system. The grid operator had also reported that an increasing reliance on renewable power plants had contributed to less control over voltage.
Overvoltage leading to disconnections for safety reasons is the most widespread theory among experts for the cause of last month’s blackout.
The power cuts have led to a fierce debate about whether dependence on renewable energy was to blame, although the suggestion has been dismissed by Sánchez, who is a champion of green causes.
Beatriz Corredor, the head of the national grid, has accused energy companies of failing to control the voltage of the electricity system, while they have said that is the national grid’s responsibility.
The energy companies Iberdrola and Endesa complained on Tuesday that a month after the failure there was no “official and detailed” explanation of the blackout and demanded “clarity, coherence and transparency” from the grid operator.