Spanish authorities were experimenting with how far they could push their reliance on renewable energy before the Iberian Peninsula was hit with a massive power outage last month, it has been suggested.
As people wait for more answers on what caused the power cut that disrupted tens of millions of lives across Spain and Portugal, several have questioned Spain’s heavy reliance on renewable energy sources as it plans to phase out nuclear reactors.
Spain’s socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has rejected such criticism, asking for patience while the government investigates the causes of the historic blackout.
Spain’s electric grid operator Red Eléctrica de España pinned it on a significant and unprecedented drop in power generation.
Now, it has been suggested that the Spanish government was carrying out an experiment before the country’s grid system crashed, The Telegraph reports.
Under said test, authorities had been trialling how far they could push their reliance on renewables as they prepared for Spain’s phase-out of nuclear reactors from 2027.
The Spanish Association of Electrical Energy Companies (Aelec), which has criticised the inquiry into the blackout’s cause, has now said it was not the country’s generators that failed to deliver power to the grid, but rather it was the grid that failed to manage it and then shut down automatically.
The head of Spain’s photovoltaic association, Jose Donoso, had made a similar suggestion earlier this month, telling newsoutlet 20Minutos: ‘It’s a matter of logic; the fact that the entire system goes down because of a photovoltaic plant makes no sense.
‘We suffered the consequences of a grid disruption, but we didn’t cause it.’
Aelec said the authorities had essentially confined the trial to a 20-second span on April 28, and ignored a series of oscillations in tension that began days earlier and transcended ’emergency’ levels across the peninsula for two hours leading up to the blackout.
The association added that the authorities did not substantiate their claim that it all began with a sudden drop of 2.2 gigawatts in power supplied to the grid.
It comes after the sweeping power outage last month raised questions about the electricity grid in a region not normally known for blackouts.
Spain’s top criminal court, the Audiencia Nacional, said it was investigating whether the blackout was ‘an act of computer sabotage on critical infrastructure’ that could be classified as ‘a terrorism offence’.
The government set up a commission to investigate what triggered the incident, and refused to rule out any hypothesis.
Spain’s grid operator ruled out a cyber attack.
