Spanish Scientists “Were Experimenting with How Far They Could Push Renewable Energy” Before Countrywide Blackout

According to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph, Spain’s catastrophic blackout (apagón) which stopped most of the country in its tracks may have been the result of a disastrous experiment to test how far the nation’s renewable energy sources can be pushed. But it wasn’t the renewables that were at fault, apparently. It was the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party fixation with rushing renewables in, without investing in the grid:

Sources in Brussels have told the Telegraph that the authorities were conducting an experiment before the system crashed, probing how far they could push reliance on renewables in preparation for Spain’s rushed phase-out of nuclear reactors from 2027.

The Government seems to have pushed the pace recklessly, before making the necessary investments in a sophisticated 21st-century smart grid capable of handling it.

One is reminded of the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, which began as a test to simulate what happens to a cooling reactor in blackout conditions. Operators ignored warnings that the Number Four reactor had too little power. It set off a cascading failure.

If it is established that the blackout was a controlled experiment that went wrong, and if this information has been withheld from the public for almost four weeks, the Spanish Left faces electoral oblivion for a political generation.

The Government has de facto control over Red Eléctrica through a golden share (in breach of EU norms). It put a socialist politician and party loyalist in charge even though she had no experience in the field and faced withering criticism at the time. Her salary in this plum job is six times higher than the Spanish Prime Minister.

Renewable energy has been blamed for the failures, but the Spanish Association of Electrical Energy Companies (AELEC) claims renewables are being scapegoated by a government whose own mismanagement is chiefly to blame:

AELEC, which includes Endesa, IBM, Iberdrola and Schneider Electric, said the authorities had inverted the likely chain of causality. It was not the generators that failed to deliver stable power to the grid: it was the grid that failed to manage it and then automatically shut down the generators, whether solar, wind, nuclear or gas.

The solar companies in the southern belt of Badajoz, Granada and Sevilla are indignant at the finger-pointing after the blackout, which insinuated that they had supplied too much power or too little power – the story keeps changing – without ever seeing any evidence for either.

AELEC said the authorities had essentially confined the inquiry to a 20-second span on April 28th, wilfully ignoring the elephant in the room: a series of wild oscillations in tension that began days earlier and surpassed ’emergency’ levels across the peninsula for two hours leading up to the blackout.

The voltage spiked from the normal 220 kilovolts (kV) to extremes of 250kV. This triggered safety shutdowns.

Claims have been aired – and denied – that there was a lack of inertia in the grid just before the blackout, causing the frequency to fall below 50 hertz.

But:

Modern systems replicate the inertia through other means, such as ‘grid-forming’ inverters at wind and solar plants. You can install synchronous condensers at substations. Britain has a fleet of flywheels that come to the rescue.

Foes of green energy like to mix up the inertia problem with the separate issue of what happens when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. The short-term answer is batteries, cryogenic compressed air and interconnectors. Spain lacks enough of any of them.

Ah yes, renewable energy would all work fine, if only everyone had enough batteries and interconnectors. We’ve heard that one before. Just don’t mention how much it would cost to build and maintain enough batteries to power a whole country, the shortage of the necessary raw materials, the fire risk and the problem that interconnectors can’t help much when a whole region is suffering under the same winter dunkelflaute.

Evans-Pritchard’s conclusion is that it’s the fixation with ‘absolutism’ that’s at fault, the obsessive belief that all other sources of power must be eliminated in the pursuit of 100% renewables:

Mr Sánchez might do better to stop waging guerrilla war against his nuclear industry. Foro Nuclear said Spain’s seven reactors have an average age of 47 years and could safely be extended to 60 years or longer.

It is the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party that ought to be on political trial in this fiasco. Green energy is the collateral casualty.

I’m pretty sure it’s both that ought to be on trial.