Spain’s power company, Red Eléctrica, proudly declared on April 16 that enough renewable energy had been generated to cover demand. “The ecological transition is moving forward,” it said.
Less than two weeks later, Spain and Portugal experienced an 18-hour blackout that disrupted daily life, shutting down businesses and schools and crippling trains and mobile networks.
Officials have given few details on the cause of the outage. But the incident exposed how Spain and Portugal, promoted as success stories in Europe’s renewable energy transition, are also uniquely vulnerable to outages, given their relative isolation from the rest of the continent’s energy supply.
“This disruption serves as a clear warning,” wrote Pratheeksha Ramdas, an analyst at Rystad Energy, a consulting firm. “Future grid failures could have even more severe consequences,” she added.
What role may reliance on renewable energy have played?
The widespread outage raises questions about the resilience of the power infrastructure in Spain and Portugal — and to an extent, Europe. The two countries have invested heavily in building renewable energy sources like wind turbines and solar farms.
More than half of Spain’s electricity came from renewable energy as of last year, up from about a quarter 15 years ago. That rapid increase has put Spain at the forefront of Europe’s transition to renewable energy and led to much lower electricity prices and less reliance on fossil fuels.
This shift, though, may also have made the grid more prone to the sort of disruption that occurred on Monday. “When you have more renewables on the grid,” Ms. Ramdas said, “then your grid is more sensitive for these kind of disturbances.”
Old-line generation sources like gas turbines and nuclear plants have a spinning momentum known as inertia, which helps buffer the fluctuations that are more common with intermittent sources like wind and solar power.
When the Spanish grid became unstable about midday on Monday, it might have been easier to keep the system functioning if conventional power sources like natural gas or nuclear turbines had a larger presence, analysts say.
“This stored rotating energy can help maintain grid frequency until sufficient backup capacity is brought online,” said Henning Gloystein, director for energy at Eurasia Group, a research firm.
The blackout could bolster the argument for retaining conventional generation sources, Mr. Gloystein said. He noted that Germany plans to build gas-fired power plants as backups for renewable energy.
How is Europe preparing for renewable power?
As renewable energy expands across Europe, the need for grid upgrades and storage has become critical. But over the last 15 years, investment in grids has lagged behind investment in alternative energy, which has doubled in that period, according to the International Energy Agency.
Spain requires more investments in grid infrastructure and additional storage facilities, like batteries to provide backup power, said Federico Santi, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group.
“So they’re almost a victim of their own success,” he said.
There are also calls for more investment in critical energy infrastructure beyond renewable energy. Another major power outage occurred in March at London’s Heathrow Airport, when a fire shut down the airport, one of the world’s busiest, for a full day, disrupting more than 1,000 flights. The incident raised questions about whether there had been enough investment in key infrastructure.
What is an ‘energy island’?
Spain and Portugal are often said to be on an energy island. Spain is connected to France by power cables, but the volumes of electricity that can flow through these conduits is a fraction of what can move between Germany and its neighbors. As for Portugal, it is completely dependent on Spain.
These conduits, known as interconnectors, help balance power systems on a daily basis and, during crises, serve as emergency sources of energy. During the blackout, France cut them off to prevent the disruption from spreading to Central Europe, according to Rystad. That worsened Spain’s power deficit and further squeezed Portugal.
As the situation stabilized, France resumed electricity exports to Spain, which helped the country restart its grid. Had the Iberian Peninsula been better connected to the rest of the continent, it might have been able to compensate more quickly for the power loss.
Several projects to improve connectivity are likely to gain momentum after the outage, Mr. Santi said, adding that pressure may increase to delay or cancel the phaseout of nuclear power stations in Spain, which was on track to be done by 2035.
Will this be a setback for renewable energy?
European countries are realizing that the push for more renewable energy and electrification of economies will be jeopardized unless they spend more on grids and other related infrastructure like batteries and other sources of energy that can be quickly tapped.
More thought and money will need to go into managing renewable energy because the power produced by these sources waxes and wanes with the wind and sun.
“Pursuing net zero does not have to lead to power outages,” Georg Zachmann, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a research organization, said, referring to cutting emissions.
