Energy Security: Net Zero Spain Leans on Nuclear, Gas to Keep Lights On After Historic Blackout

Spain is running its national power grid in “strengthened mode”, using more nuclear and natural gas in place of the renewables it vaunted before last month’s historic blackout, but still hasn’t said what started the outage.

Spain still hasn’t officially acknowledged it knows what caused the historic blackout that started in the south of the nation and cascaded to totally knock out all electricity in two European countries, but now says it is certain it wasn’t the victim of a cyber attack. Two weeks after the total loss of all energy generation on the Iberian peninsula of Spain and Portugal, the national generation agency Red Eléctrica (RE) and the government ministry are now agreed there was no digital intrusion detected, Minister for Ecological Transition and Energy Sara Aagesen told their national Parliament this week, reports EnergyNews.

Euronews cites the remarks of the minister, who revealed for the first time that the cascade that disconnected power source after power source from the national grid started at a substation in Grenada, Andalusia, on April 28th. Yet what caused that substation to disconnect, causing that chain-reaction, has not yet been revealed, and the Spanish government say it could be months before they publish a report.

She said: “The government is working with rigour and not making hypotheses, because that is what the Spanish people deserve. Rigour and truth”. It was also revealed for the first time that two oscillations in the European power grid had been detected shortly before the Spanish blackout, but whether this is connected or circumstantial is not yet clear.

Bloomberg energy industry journalist Javier Blas, who is Spanish, further notes in a digest of Aagesen’s remarks that she also said — without elaboration — in her address to Parliament that the grid operator was now running the system in “strengthened mode”. He linked this statement to real time data openly available from the power network that shows “far more” nuclear energy and natural gas being used to keep the grid operating.

Indeed, per the BBC, at the time of the April blackout the Spanish grid was working on over 75 per cent ‘renewables’, with just 11 per cent of the power mix being nuclear and five per cent gas. Per the latest data, in recent days more reliable traditional generation is being used more, with nuclear responsible for between 14 and 23 per cent, and natural gas-fired plants accounting for up to 25 per cent at times.

It may be the case the Iberian Peninsula blackout — when the Spanish government comes clean on what happened, and why — brings valuable lessons on how to operate complex systems that traditionally relied on the literal inertia of spinning turbines to overcome challenges that could defeat less robust renewable technology. Yet despite the utility of nuclear being available to sustain an energy grid at zero-notice and having that resilience to balance the grid, it is still officially Spanish government policy to decommission every plant within a decade and not replace them.

This would leave the country with just natural gas to backup the ‘net zero’ renewable grid after the final coal plant goes offline this year.

Nuclear plant operator Iberdrola warned against this path in March, a month before the Iberian blackout. A spokesman told the Financial Times that ending nuclear altogether — rrepeating “the big mistake made by Germany” — would lead to  “much higher prices and [a] less reliable system”. The spokesman said: “Can we as Europeans be in a position to renounce those natural energy resources, just because of ideology? Or do we have to be pragmatic, like the Americans?… The Spanish will pay for [closing nuclear plants]”.

The report noted nuclear plant owners were “under pressure from a Socialist-led government” concerned about “safety and waste disposal” to shut down.