Europe’s first grid crisis may not be its last
Spain’s blackout serves as a reminder of the fragility of power systems in the age of green energy
Rachel Millard in London, Jamie Smyth in New York and Ian Johnston in Paris
A Barcelona street in darkness on Monday © Alberto Paredes/Europa Press/ABACA/ReutersYosselyn Jara Sandoval was crammed inside a train underneath central Madrid when the lights went out and the train stopped.
“We wanted to get off but they didn’t let us,” she says.
“Everything was dark and people started to suffocate.”
About an hour and a half later, they were allowed off the train, and groped their way along the walls with the help of flashlights.
“It was like a horror movie,” adds Sandoval, who had travelled from the suburbs to buy her father a birthday present.
“People were falling.”
Outside, she discovered they were far from alone.
At about 12.33pm on Monday, about half of Spain’s electricity generation capacity fell offline, shutting off power across Spain and Portugal.
Hospitals suspended routine work, factories and refineries had to curtail output, mobile phone networks were cut off, traffic lights stalled and police were deployed to keep order.
By 11pm, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez declared a state of emergency.
Several days on, the cause of Europe’s biggest blackout in two decades is still being investigated.
Spain’s grid operator, Red Eléctrica, says a loss of generation in the country’s south-west led to a sudden cascade of failures.
What tripped off, why, and how this escalated so dramatically is unclear.
But the fact that an entire peninsula could be plunged into darkness in a matter of seconds has caused alarm around the world, raising urgent questions about the stability of energy infrastructure at a time when many countries are switching to low carbon electricity instead of burning fossil fuels.
By 2050, around 70 per cent of final global energy demand is expected to be met by electricity if climate goals are reached, according to modelling by the Energy Transitions Commission, up from 20 per cent today.
The bulk of that would be supplied by wind and solar farms.
But getting to that point requires a massive overhaul of the way electricity systems are run in order to manage the intermittent supply from renewables, which can cause systemic instability.
Engineers at an electrical substation in Burgos, Spain. The fact that an entire peninsula could be plunged into darkness in a matter of seconds has caused alarm around the world © Angel Garcia/BloombergThe failures originating in Spain, which has rapidly rolled out solar farms and wind turbines over the past few years, has some asking whether national grids built for a different time are being overtasked — and whether this week is a glimpse at Europe’s near-term energy future.
“Our power systems were conceived for an era of centralised, predictable generation,” says Xavier Daval, chair of France’s renewable energy trade association SOLER-SER.
“But the emerging electric world is distributed, digital, and adaptive.
This is not a glitch to patch — it’s a paradigm that must be rethought.”
Less than two weeks ago, many of the European officials now tackling the fallout from Spain’s power cuts were in London for energy security talks hosted by the International Energy Agency and the UK government.
In a paper prepared for attendees, the IEA warned of a “complex array of interconnected challenges” on electricity systems, including fossil fuel-fired power plants being shut down before the system is able to cope without them.
Wind and solar power lack the natural inertia provided by large coal and gas turbines, which can help stabilise the system in the event of disruption.
That brings fresh challenges to running a system as complex as an electricity network: thousands of generators and users spanning hundreds of miles across which supply and demand have to be constantly matched and frequency kept perfectly stable.
“Power grids are the most complicated machines in the world,” says Duncan Burt at Reactive Technologies, who previously played a key role in Britain’s efforts to make sure its own power grid is fit for cleaner power.
But they can be upgraded to deal with new obstacles, he insists.
There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes.
You’ve got to arrive dressed for the occasion.”
Grid operators are finding new technologies to mimic and measure inertia and keep the grid balanced, ranging from spinning flywheels to lithium-ion batteries that can charge and discharge within milliseconds to help prevent power cuts.
But it is a different system that requires careful management.
“The whole behaviour of power systems was based around the physics of synchronous machines” that operate steadily, says Janusz Bialek, an expert in power systems at Imperial College London, and member of the steering committee of the Global Power System Transformation Consortium.
“Now, it’s [based on] power electronics” — or using technology to manage flows of electricity.
Work to address these technical challenges comes as a huge increase in investment is needed in the sheer infrastructure such as cable and pylons to connect new generation capacity and move electricity from remote wind and solar farms into city centres, as well as to protect the network against extreme weather.
The Energy Transitions Commission estimates that, by 2050 in order to meet climate goals, electricity networks would need to expand from about 68mn km of grid in 2023 to around 120mn km, requiring about $800bn a year investment in the 2030s and 2040s.
Many parts of Europe’s grids are more than 40 years old, and the European Commission estimates they need €584bn of investment this decade.
But investment has lagged behind in many areas and regulators risk blocking progress if they “continue to rely on the rear-view mirror” rather than allowing investments to be made in anticipation of demand, warns Viken Chinien, head of markets and risk at DNV Energy Systems.
“There is a missing money problem across technologies,” adds Kristian Ruby, secretary-general of trade group Eurelectric, calling for more electricity storage in particular.
Spain’s lack of technology to help stabilise the system, lack of batteries, and limited capacity to exchange power with other countries made it an “accident waiting to happen,” says Helge Barlen, head of transaction support in the European power team at the consultancy Wood Mackenzie.
“As you integrate ever more renewables into a structure that is not made for it, it’s a question of when and where something will go wrong.”
Countries beyond Europe have also seen system failures as they cope with rising demand.
China, by far the world’s biggest power market, is in the middle of a massive upgrade of its electricity system, with spending forecast to reach $84bn this year alone, to help connect solar and wind power plants with key centres of urban and industrial demand.
In 2022, it experienced blackouts in the south-west as droughts meant hydropower plants produced less.
In some areas, it has approved coal-fired power stations to avoid a repeat.
Chinese grid planners appear willing to accept some wasted system capacity if it contributes to energy security, says David Fishman, a Shanghai-based energy analyst at The Lantau Group, a consultancy.
“[Other countries] may build their grids with more efficient allocation of resources but leave them more vulnerable to ‘black swan’ events,” he says.
Ecuador last year suffered rolling nationwide blackouts lasting up to 14 hours per day after droughts affected electricity output in hydropower.
“That over-reliance on hydro created risks,” said Alberto Levy, a former Inter-American Development Bank official.
In other countries, system collapses have prompted reforms.
In 2012, India suffered the world’s largest outage after the northern and eastern grids collapsed due to an overload, cutting power to 620mn people for more than half a day.
Since then the national transmission network, now the world’s largest unified grid, has been upgraded to help state-run operator Grid-India balance the system by distributing power between regions.
The world’s most-populous nation fears that the rise in cooling devices during periods of high heat will still put pressure on the power distribution system.
“Things have improved but India still has to improve, there’s no room for complacency,” says Sushil Kumar Soonee, the former chief executive of India’s Power System Operation Corporation Limited, now called Grid-India.
“In fact, no power system in the world can say that nothing would happen.”
The higher frequency of extreme weather events, often linked to climate change, also puts pressure on electricity grids.
More than 4.5mn people were cut off from electricity supplies in Texas in 2021 after wind turbines and pipelines delivering gas to power stations froze up in a powerful winter storm, just as households tried to turn up electric heating to cope with the cold.
The incident cost as much as $130bn and was blamed for hundreds of deaths.
People in Albacete gather during the recent blackout, when hospitals had to suspend routine work, factories and refineries had to curtail output and mobile phone networks were cut off © Victor Fernandez/Europa Press/ABACA/ReutersWhile the circumstances were very different to those in Spain, experts say one factor does link the two events: a lack of grid interconnection to exchange power with other regions that might balance its own.
“The Spanish peninsula has more [connections] than Texas but not a lot,” says Michael Goggin, vice-president at Grid Strategies, a Washington-based consultancy focused on transmission and power markets.
“It is not enough to get them through an event like this.”
As questions about the incident reverberate around the world, Spain’s grid operator has defended itself.
“I have said many times and I will maintain it and I will say it loud and clear that we have the best electrical system,” Beatriz Corredor, president of Red Eléctrica, told Spanish radio this week.
Her end customers are not so sure.
It’s hard to fathom that “the grid doesn’t understand what happened,” says William Oplinger, chief executive of aluminium producer Alcoa, which has a smelter and a refinery in northern Spain.
“It is very difficult to have an electro-intensive business in a place that can’t guarantee that the electricity will stay on.”
Additional reporting by Edward White, Andres Schipani, Joe Daniels, Alice Hancock and Irene de la Torre Arenas
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