On April 28, Spain and Portugal were hit by a massive blackout that lasted several hours and left millions without electricity. According to some reports, the crisis may have stemmed from a high reliance on renewable energy at a time when the grid wasn’t prepared to handle it.
A new article on Minener.com dives deep into the controversy:
Was Spain’s Blackout a Failed Renewable Energy Experiment?
Read full article: https://minener.com/was-spains-blackout-a-failed-renewable-energy-experiment/
Key takeaways:
• The outage began with a failure at a substation in Granada and cascaded from there.
• At the time, renewables were providing the majority of Spain’s electricity—solar and wind were dominant.
• Critics (including sources cited by The Telegraph) claim the government was testing the limits of renewable integration before the grid was ready.
• Spain’s grid operator denies that renewables were to blame, pointing instead to underinvestment in grid infrastructure.
• The EU is now being asked to expedite interconnection projects and possibly lead an independent investigation.
Discussion questions:
• Are governments pushing renewables too fast without ensuring grid readiness?
• What kind of infrastructure investments are needed to make high-renewable grids resilient?
• Could this event change how EU countries manage their energy transitions?
Would love to hear others’ thoughts—especially from those in Spain or working in energy policy.
Was Spain’s Blackout a Failed Renewable Energy Experiment?
byu/fablewriter inenergy
by fablewriter
6 comments
No.
Grid instability is an issue with a large amount of inverter based generation. It is a failure in not adding dampening and inertia to the grid through syn-cons, grid forming inverters, and battery/capacity storage. As rotational generators are removed, policy must encourage (or require) grid components that ensure active dampening (grid forming inverters), passive dampening (syncons), inertia (syncons), and stiffness (interconnection). Smart use of FACTS controllers would also improve overall grid resilience.
It might be a worldwide thing. The grids were designed with thermal power in mind and with the introduction of renewables, the grid needs a redesign.
Since the grid is so expansive/massive, it needs big capital to upgrade it to make it more resilient to fluctuations from renewable.
Would batteries help with dampening the instantaneous fluctuations? Until they can pull in power from other parts of EU? (Sorry, I’m not familiar with the Spain/EU grid interconnection) or get some big consumers to power down until supply returns.
That’s how it seems from my armchair, but please feel free to correct my assumptions. I’m not really a grid person.
That news outlet is publishing anonymous source rumors to get pageviews to sell advertising.
The world is simply going to have to wait for the engineering study: https://www.entsoe.eu/news/2025/05/09/entso-e-expert-panel-initiates-the-investigation-into-the-causes-of-iberian-blackout/.
To do that study the engineers will have the grid topology at the time, expensive dynamics modeling software Reddit does not have, and the detailed data logs including sub-second generation and load at each substation and across each line which Reddit does not have, They will try various approaches on the model until they match the actual data, then they will simulate changes that would have prevented the incident.
You can read detailed past post-blackout studies at ENTSO-e and NERC and the lessons learned. Examples for Europe are at https://www.entsoe.eu/publications/system-operations-reports/.
>Key takeaways: • The outage **began** with a failure at a substation…
Did it?
From other (limited) info it looks like the outage was the ‘result’ of something that should not have happened.
it was on purpose. don’t trust the bots in comments.
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