MADRID (Reuters) – Spain’s grid operator denied on Wednesday that dependence on solar power was to blame for the country’s worst ever blackout, as Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez faced increasing pressure to explain what went wrong.
With life returning to normal after a blackout that halted trains, shut airports and trapped Spaniards in lifts, Sanchez’s opponents pointed the finger at low investment in a system that relies heavily on intermittent solar and wind.
Sanchez has announced a government investigation and said he was seeking answers from private energy companies that feed power into the grid. He also said he has not ruled out a cyber attack, although this has been dismissed by part-state-owned grid operator REE and private companies.
REE, which is headed by former Socialist minister Beatriz Corredor, has narrowed down the source of the outage to two separate incidents in substations in southwestern Spain, but says it is still too early to explain what caused them.
In an interview with Cadena SER radio, Corredor said on Wednesday it was wrong to blame the outage on Spain’s high share of renewable energy.
“These technologies are already stable and they have systems that allow them to operate as a conventional generation system without any safety issues,” she said. She was not considering resigning, she added.
In a separate interview she said the government had given power companies a deadline to provide data by Wednesday afternoon that would help explain what had gone wrong.
‘MALFUNCTIONING OF REE’
Political opponents said Sanchez was taking too long to explain the blackout, and suggested he was covering up for failings at REE.
“Since REE has ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack, we can only point to the malfunctioning of REE, which has state investment and therefore its leaders are appointed by the government,” Miguel Tellado, a parliamentary spokesperson for the opposition conservative People’s Party, said in an interview on RTVE.
He called for an independent investigation to be conducted by Spain’s parliament rather than the government probe Sanchez has announced.
Spain’s government said it had asked private energy companies for “maximum collaboration and transparency” to help identify the cause of the outage.
Ignacio Sanchez Galan, executive chairman of Spain’s largest energy company Iberdrola, said on Wednesday that the fault was not with their operations and it was REE that should clarify the reasons for the blackout.
Antonio Turiel, an energy expert at the state-owned Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), told Onda Vasca radio station on Tuesday that the fundamental problem was the grid’s instability.
“A lot of renewable energy has been integrated without the responsive stabilisation systems that should have been in place,” he said, adding that vulnerabilities stemmed from “the unplanned and haphazard integration of a host of renewable systems”.
The government expects private and public investment of some 52 billion euros through 2030 to upgrade the power grid so it can handle the surge in demand from data centres and electric vehicles. Aelec, the utility lobby, has said that isn’t enough.
(Reporting by David Latona and Pietro Lombardi in Madrid; Writing by Charlie Devereux)
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