Did renewables cause 60 million people to lose power?
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Just 1.5 seconds later, a second event occurred, further destabilising the grid, and 3.5 seconds after that, a third, which interrupted the border connection between Spain and France. Subsequently, there was a cascading shutdown of renewables, nuclear, gas and hydro generation. Spain and Portugal went dark.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has ruled out both a cyberattack and excess renewables in the system as a cause of the blackout.
“Those linking the blackout to the lack of nuclear power are either lying or demonstrating their ignorance,” he said in a press conference.
Blas remains unconvinced, calling the incident “the first big blackout of the green electricity era”.
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Spanish energy think tank Fundacion Renovables has called for commentators to stop using the incident as political fodder. It said the disturbance in the grid was a consequence rather than a cause of the blackout.
“The fact that Spain has a high production of electricity from renewable sources has no link to the grid failures that occurred on Monday,” it said in a statement. “We regret that an extremely serious situation is being taken advantage of to spread falsehoods and generate disinformation in an already very complex situation for all affected citizens.”
But there are lessons for countries like Australia that are seeking to ramp up the amount of renewables in their systems, says Bruce Mountain, director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre at Victoria University.
“We in Australia, and globally, are going through a massive energy shift which is unlikely to slow down simply because the renewable resource, although it’s variable, is the cheapest by far, and businesses and customers want it,” he said.
Mountain fears the creation of a transmission system adequate to the task of moving variable energy from various sources to our cities is not happening fast enough. But he does believe that grids heavily reliant on renewables can be made reliable.
Lisa Zumbrodt of Schneider Electric, one of Australia’s largest corporate energy advisers, said it is possible that high solar input into Spain’s grid reduced the system’s inertia – the grid’s ability to maintain a stable frequency despite fluctuations in supply and demand.
She said that, since the 2016 blackout in South Australia, changes have been made to the Australian grid to reduce the likelihood of another similar event here.
“The grid in SA, while much smaller than the Spanish grid, has successfully managed instances with high renewable energy generation for several years now,” Zumbrodt said.
In other words, green grids can work, but they have to be built right.
