SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
It took just seconds for modern life in Spain and Portugal to grind to a halt on Monday when the power grid of the Iberian Peninsula shut down just after midday, causing lights to flicker out, traffic signals to darken and the transport system to seize, leaving passengers of underground trains to evacuate through darkened tunnels.
In what is thought to be the largest power outage in modern European history, 60 million people were left without power, possibly causing seven deaths. It was almost a day before power was fully restored.
Within hours, the outage had become part of climate culture warfare, with the conservative British newspaper The Telegraph, known for its climate scepticism, declaring in a front page headline, “Net Zero Blamed for Blackout Chaos”. In fact, the story accompanying the headline did not really say such a thing, but the experts it quoted outlined some of the possible frailties of renewable heavy grids.
No matter. Hours later, Australian Nationals senator Matt Canavan posted the story on social media, where a debate over renewables, net zero and power systems bubbled away. The world of conservative commentators pointed the finger, not least, on Sky News in Australia.
It is not yet clear what caused the blackout but here is what we do know.
Just days before the blackout, the Spanish grid operator, Red Electrica, had boasted that for the first time renewables had for a period provided 100 per cent of the electricity in the system.
A family eats a snack by candlelight during a blackout in Barcelona, Spain.Credit: AP
Spain’s grid is dominated by renewables, with wind making up almost a quarter of its overall power, followed by solar and nuclear. Fossil fuels provide just over 20 per cent of the mix.
Once the blackout occurred, Red Electrica told journalists in a conference call that sometime after 12.33pm the grid in the nation’s solar rich south-west suffered “an event”, stabilising itself in milliseconds. (I am relying for this on notes taken during the call, which was conducted in Spanish, by Bloomberg energy columnist Javier Blas, which he later published on X.)
Just 1.5 seconds later, a second event occurred, further destabilising the grid, and 3.5 seconds after that, a third, which interrupted the border connection between Spain and France. Subsequently, there was a cascading shutdown of renewables, nuclear, gas and hydro generation. Spain and Portugal went dark.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has ruled out both a cyberattack and excess renewables in the system as a cause of the blackout.
“Those linking the blackout to the lack of nuclear power are either lying or demonstrating their ignorance,” he said in a press conference.
Blas remains unconvinced, calling the incident “the first big blackout of the green electricity era”.
Spanish energy think tank Fundacion Renovables has called for commentators to stop using the incident as political fodder. It said the disturbance in the grid was a consequence rather than a cause of the blackout.
“The fact that Spain has a high production of electricity from renewable sources has no link to the grid failures that occurred on Monday,” it said in a statement. “We regret that an extremely serious situation is being taken advantage of to spread falsehoods and generate disinformation in an already very complex situation for all affected citizens.”
But there are lessons for countries like Australia that are seeking to ramp up the amount of renewables in their systems, says Bruce Mountain, director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre at Victoria University.
“We in Australia, and globally, are going through a massive energy shift which is unlikely to slow down simply because the renewable resource, although it’s variable, is the cheapest by far, and businesses and customers want it,” he said.
Mountain fears the creation of a transmission system adequate to the task of moving variable energy from various sources to our cities is not happening fast enough. But he does believe that grids heavily reliant on renewables can be made reliable.
Lisa Zumbrodt of Schneider Electric, one of Australia’s largest corporate energy advisers, said it is possible that high solar input into Spain’s grid reduced the system’s inertia – the grid’s ability to maintain a stable frequency despite fluctuations in supply and demand.
She said that, since the 2016 blackout in South Australia, changes have been made to the Australian grid to reduce the likelihood of another similar event here.
“The grid in SA, while much smaller than the Spanish grid, has successfully managed instances with high renewable energy generation for several years now,” Zumbrodt said.
In other words, green grids can work, but they have to be built right.
