Spain’s grid denies renewable energy to blame for massive blackout

As Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is under increasing pressure to explain what went wrong, Spain’s grid operator has denied that solar power was to blame for the country’s worst blackout.

On Wednesday, Red Electrica de Espana (REE) stated that two separate instances of generation loss have been reduced to substation losses in southwest Spain, but that it is too early to make any conclusions because it has not yet located them in its exact location.

Former Socialist minister Beatriz Corredor, the head of REE, claimed that Spain’s high level of renewable energy was to blame for the failure.

She continued, adding that she was not thinking about leaving because “these technologies are already stable and they have systems that allow them to operate as a conventional generation system without any safety issues.”

After a power outage on Monday that temporarily halted trains, shut airports, and trapped people in lifts in Spain and Portugal, life was returning to normal.

According to REE data, Spain’s solar energy contributed almost a third of the country’s electricity production just before the system crashed, with wind and nuclear energy accounting for almost a third.

After his left-wing coalition government invested in expanding the renewable energy sector, his political opponents criticized Sanchez for putting forth an overly lengthy explanation of the blackout and suggested he was hiding behind mistakes.

We can only point to the malfunction of REE because it has state funding and its leaders are appointed by the government, according to Miguel Tellado, a People’s Party parliamentary spokesperson in an interview with RTVE.

Tellado demanded that Spain’s parliament conduct an independent investigation rather than Sanchez’s government investigation. Despite REE rejecting this, the prime minister has not ruled out a cyberattack.

The grid’s instability, according to Antonio Turiel, an energy expert at the state-owned Spanish National Research Council, is the main cause of the energy crisis, according to Antonio Turiel, a researcher with the state-owned Spanish National Research Council.

He claimed that “a lot of renewable energy has been integrated without the responsive stabilization systems that should have been in place.” He added that vulnerabilities resulted from “the unplanned and haphazard integration of a host of renewable systems.”

To upgrade the power grid to handle the rise in demand from data centers and electric vehicles, the government had predicted private and public investments of about 52 billion euros ($59 billion) through 2030.