The incident is ‘a lesson in trigger events and systemic risk, both of which are exaggerated by renewables,’ says analyst Andy Mayer.
For one day in the sunny Iberian Peninsula, the lights went off, in what has been described as the worst blackout in living memory in Europe.
With power now restored, authorities are probing the root cause, but energy analysts say that the region’s heavy reliance on intermittent renewables may have enabled the grid collapse.
The core issue is grid frequency, a 50Hz “heartbeat” that must stay balanced and is fundamental to how electricity travels through the grid.
To keep the frequency stable, the grid needs an unwavering force of power, something the industry refers to as “inertia.”
Fossil fuel oil and gas-fired stations and nuclear power plants have traditionally enabled the decades-old grid to keep a consistent frequency.
However, the rapid increase in renewables and their variable output can effectively throw the rest of the grid out of balance, analysts say.
An unexplained fault on April 28 led to widespread power cuts across Spain, Portugal, and parts of southern France.
The disturbance caused the France–Spain interconnector to trip, instantly isolating the two networks.
Red Eléctrica de España (REE) said on April 30 that there had already been two significant “disconnection events,” or interruptions in power, earlier on the same day.
“The Iberian incident is a lesson in trigger events and systemic risk, both of which are exaggerated by renewables,” Andy Mayer, COO and energy analyst at the free market think tank Institute of Economic Affairs, told The Epoch Times by email.
Since adopting its Climate Change and Energy Transition Law in May 2021, Spain has pledged climate neutrality by 2050, with a complete nuclear phase-out by 2035.
The first reactor is slated to close in 2027, envisioning a grid powered almost exclusively by wind and solar.
At an April 29 briefing, REE system-operations chief Eduardo Prieto acknowledged a “major loss of generation” in southwestern Spain, possibly caused by solar, but cautioned that investigations were ongoing.
By Owen Evans
