Spain’s environment minister has warned against attempts to blame Monday’sunprecedented blackout across the Iberian peninsulaon the increasing use of renewable energy, defending the reliability of the national grid and promising a “complete audit” to establish the causes of the outage.
Speaking on Wednesday afternoon as a specially designated committee prepared to meet to investigate the blackout, Sara Aagesen pushed back at opposition parties’ claims that the socialist-led government’s drive to embrace renewable energy had compromised the grid’s stability.
She said Spain’s electricity on Monday had been generated from a mix of different sources, with solar power accounting for almost 55% of the total, followed by 10% from wind power, 10% from nuclear power and almost 10% from hydraulic power.
“The system has worked to perfection with a similar demand situation and with a similar energetic mix [in the past], so pointing the finger at renewables when the system has functioned perfectly in the same context doesn’t seem very appropriate,” she told reporters.
Opponents of the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, have suggested over recent days that he pushed ahead with plans to prioritise renewable energy over nuclear energy without thinking of the consequences, and is now trying to blame private energy companies for the blackout.
The conservative People’s party (PP) accused the prime minister of waging “an information blackout” over the incident, while Santiago Abascal, the leader of the far-right Vox party, has blamed the power cut squarely on Sánchez and his “disastrous energy policies”.
Some have also seized on a recent financial report from Redeia – the parent company of Red Eléctrica, Spain’s national grid operator – which warned that “the high penetration of renewable generation without the necessary technical capacity to deal adequately with disturbances” could “lead to production cuts”. It added that blackouts “could become severe, even leading to an imbalance between production and demand, which would significantly affect the electricity supply”.
Aagesen insisted that renewable energy was vital if Spain was to remain a competitive and strategically autonomous power producer.
“We have native resources – the sun, the wind – in our country and we don’t have fossil fuels or uranium,” she said. “We do have sun and wind and I think a lot of businesses share our commitment to transforming our energy system and making it more and more renewable.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Red Eléctrica’s president, Beatriz Corredor, said the company knew what had caused the blackout but was still poring over a huge amount of data.
“We know the cause and we have it more or less tracked down, but the thing is there are millions of pieces of information because signals are sent every millisecond,” Corredor told Cadena Ser radio. Corredor said she would not be resigning over the incident, adding: “To do so would be recognise that the correct actions weren’t taken, and that wasn’t the case.”
She also insisted it was incorrect to link the blackout to Spain’s increasing reliance on renewable energy. “The renewables mix is safe and it can form part of all the safety systems of the electrical operating system,” she told Cadena Ser. “Linking what happened on Monday to renewables isn’t correct. Renewables work in a stable way.”
Sánchez himself has been blunter. “Those who link this incident to the lack of nuclear power are frankly lying or demonstrating their ignorance,” he said on Tuesday, adding that nuclear power generation “was no more resilient” than other electricity sources.
Sánchez summoned the heads of Spain’s private energy operators– including Corredor and representatives from Iberdrola, Endesa, EDP, Acciona Energía and Naturgy – to an urgent meeting on Tuesday evening to discuss the blackout. The prime minister has said the committee will be looking into the role of private energy companies and urged them to help the government get to the bottom of the blackout as soon as possible.
Aagesen said some of the operators had already provided huge amounts of data, with the rest of the information expected over the next few days.
“As soon as we know what caused this event, we’ll put all necessary measures on the table so that it doesn’t happen again,” she said.
The investigations are focusing on what happened at 12.33pm on Monday, when, for five seconds, 15 gigawatts of the energy that was being produced – equivalent to 60% of all the energy that was being used – suddenly disappeared.
Spain aims to generate 81% of its electricity from renewables by the end of the decade. Last year, a record 56% of its electricity came from renewable sources.