In Spain, renewable energy in the dock after blackout

A woman uses her phone’s torch while she walks her dog as the street In Vigo, Spain, lies in complete darkness during a massive power cut affecting the entire Iberian peninsula and the south of France.(Photo by MIGUEL RIOPA / AFP)

MADRID, Spain — Fierce debate raged in Spain on Wednesday over the role its reliance on renewable energy may have had in this week’s blackout which disrupted millions of lives. However, officials sought to downplay any potential link.

“The lack of nuclear power stations and the ‘boom’ in renewables have brought the electricity grid to its knees,” conservative newspaper ABC headlined on its front page.

Rival daily El Mundo wrote that “warnings about renewables over the last five years” had been “ignored.”

Conservative opposition parties have also questioned Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s push to make Spain a green energy champion. This was in the wake of Monday’s power outage which halted trains, trapped people in elevators and plunged cities into darkness in the country and neighboring Portugal.

Solar and wind power accounted for almost 40 percent of Spain’s electricity last year, according to electricity operator REE. This is twice as much as the ratio in 2014.

Spain wants to phase out nuclear energy by 2035

By contrast, the share of electricity generated by nuclear power fell to 20 percent in 2024. The government is aiming to phase out its atomic power plants by 2035.

Questions about the resilience of this mix began to be raised after it emerged that REE’s parent company, Redeia, warned in its 2024 financial report that “the high penetration of renewable generation without the necessary technical capacity to deal adequately with disturbances” could “lead to production cuts.”

READ: Massive blackout hits all of Spain and Portugal

These blackouts “could become severe, even leading to an imbalance between production and demand, which would significantly affect the electricity supply”, it added in the report published in February.

This message was echoed in a January report by Spain’s competition watchdog CNMC. It said the voltage on the electricity grid had sometimes “reached maximum values close to the authorized thresholds, and have even exceeded them at certain times.”

Imbalance of supply and demand in Spain

After the blackout, experts questioned if an imbalance between electricity production and demand could have led to the collapse of the system. Such an imbalance is harder to correct without the right technology in a grid with significant wind and solar power generation.

But Redeia president Beatriz Corredor — a former Socialist lawmaker — said renewable energy production “is secure. She added  during an interview with news radio Cadena Ser on Wednesday that it was “wrong” to link it to the blackout.

Redeia’s 380-page annual financial report was merely listing a series of potential risks as required by law, she said.

Asked about the controversy, Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen said Wednesday the cause of the blackout was still unknown. She said it was “imprudent to speculate.”

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“The system has worked perfectly well with similar demand and a comparable energy mix. Consequently, pointing the finger at renewables… does not seem appropriate,” she added, calling Spain’s network “robust”.

Sanchez on Tuesday defended his government’s energy model and stressed that the cause of the outage was not yet known.

“Those who link this incident to the lack of nuclear power are frankly lying or demonstrating their ignorance,” he told a news conference.

“Nuclear power plants, far from being a solution, have been a problem” during the blackout because “it was necessary to divert large amounts of energy to them to keep their cores stable,” Sanchez said.

Spain’s power grid lost 15,000 MW in 5 seconds

Spain’s electricity network lost 15 gigawatts of electricity generation in just five seconds on Monday at around 12:33 pm.  This is the equivalent of 60 percent of the country’s electricity consumption at the time .

Spain’s top criminal court said Tuesday it is investigating whether the blackout was “an act of computer sabotage.” However, REE has ruled out a cyberattack.

It has instead identified as a possible cause of the blackout two separate incidents just one and a half seconds apart. This may have affected solar power production in southwest Spain.

But REE stressed it is “not possible to draw any conclusions” at this stage.