Spanish Experts Blame Grid Lags For The April 28 Blackout

 

Spanish experts blame grid lags for the April 28 blackout, and regulation service costs could exceed €2 billion in 2025.

 

Nuclear power expert Manuel Fernández Ordóñez, speaking at a parliamentary committee investigating the April 28 blackout, stated that the crisis was not caused by an increase in the share of solar and wind power, but rather by grid structure and regulatory lags, as well as instability-threatening decisions made by the Spanish power grid company (Red Eléctrica de España) in system operations. He stated, "Perhaps we simply asked the grid to undertake a task it was incapable of, and the grid responded forcefully to its inability." The expert directly held the REE, led by Beatriz Corredor, responsible for the regulatory errors that triggered widespread overvoltages. He also condemned the lack of transparency in the management of what he called a "catastrophic" event, citing unresolved technical issues, such as the criteria for determining the generation mix that day.

 

Ordóñez emphasized that the current protection system, still based on 1996 technical standards, has failed to keep pace with the energy transition, despite repeated warnings from operators in reports from 2020, 2023, and 2024. "There were ample warnings that such an event could occur," he said, expressing confidence that the case would ultimately proceed to legal proceedings. He also praised Spain's progress over the past five years: a doubling of wind and solar capacity, the closure of most coal-fired power plants, and a record drop in emissions. By 2024, variable renewable energy sources accounted for over 40% of the country's electricity mix, ten percentage points higher than the European average, driving both wholesale electricity prices and emissions to historic lows. "Spain has demonstrated that it can integrate renewable energy on a large scale without compromising system stability," he said, but warned that these achievements are posed by economic and technical pressures.

 

Plummeting wholesale electricity prices to zero or even negative values ​​threaten the profitability of new wind and solar projects. "Thousands of generators are unable to sell electricity due to insufficient demand," he said, noting that the overcapacity (130 GW of installed capacity, compared to a peak historical consumption of only 45 GW) is jeopardizing future investment and even climate goals. Ordóñez firmly defends renewable energy: "The fault of power outages is not solar or wind power, the problem is not the power generation technology itself, but how to select and manage energy according to real-time conditions." He opposes the "false opposition" between clean and traditional technologies, and emphasizes that maintaining synchronous power sources (coal, gas, hydropower or nuclear power) to supplement fluctuating renewable energy is still crucial to grid stability.