Massive blackout in Spain shows need for grid investment, battery storage, experts say

An underdeveloped power grid, not a rapid buildout of solar panels, was the mostly likely cause of the devastating blackout that hit Spain and Portugal April 28, even though renewable energy opponents were quick enough to blame solar.

The loss of power triggered an immediate response from Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who insisted the massive outage “was not triggered by excess renewables or a lack of nuclear power” and immediately pledged a national inquiry and grid reform, PV Magazine reported at the time. In the days that followed, insufficient attention and investment in Spain’s transmission system emerged as the more obvious culprit, with a possible cameo role for nuclear power plant operators in France who were none too eager to compete with cheaper solar resources on the Spanish grid.

Grid operator Red Eléctrica de España (REE) initially blamed the blackout on a “loss of generation” bigger than the system could absorb, brought on by a mismatch between supply and demand, PV Mag said. Heatmap cited an early Reuters report that solar on the grid dropped from 18,000 to 8,000 megawatts on the Monday afternoon, after “two large-scale losses” of generation in the southwestern part of the country.

But within days, Bloomberg was reporting that the incident spotlighted “potential vulnerabilities” in the Spanish grid “that could offer lessons for other countries” as they electrify and shift to clean energy.

“Much of Spain’s grid equipment was built and installed decades ago,” Bloomberg wrote. “That means substations—the nodes that connect the different electricity lines—weren’t designed to handle the high variability inherent in wind and solar power.”

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