Spain suffered several power glitches and industry officials sounded repeated warnings about the instability of its power grid in the build up to its catastrophic blackout on Monday.
The government has ordered several investigations into the blackout. Industry experts say that whatever the cause, the mass outage and earlier smaller incidents indicate the Spanish power grid faces challenges amid the boom of renewables.
A surplus of energy supply can disrupt power grids in the same way as a deficit, and grid operators must maintain balance.
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While that is indeed not the most objective source, they are actually correct. Even if their stability argument didn’t hold water (it does), they should keep the nuclear plants active and upgrade transmission lines to export to Germany through France and displace coal plants in Germany’s electricity market… And literally save on radioactive waste which coal plants produce tons of.
Both Portugal and Spain want to have power lines connecting the Iberian Peninsula to the rest of Europe.
The problem is that France refuses to allow the construction of lines to export energy from Portugal and Spain to the rest of Europe because that would threaten France’s very own business of exporting the power generated by its nuclear power plants to the rest of Europe.
In this latest power outage it would’ve been especially beneficiary to Portugal to be connected to nations other than just Spain, since Spain’s problems dragged down the Portuguese grid, and if there was a different place from where Portugal could have sourced enough power to make up for the sudden crash of the power coming from Spain, the country might have avoided the total collapse of power.
France already has bidirectional power lines to trade electricity with Spain.
They were used to rapidly restore power in northern Spain after the outage and that interconnection actually caused a very short blackout in southwestern France.
The infrastructure France thankfully refused to allow is fossil gas lines, saving Europe decades of gas usage to justify the investment.
From what I’ve heard on TV around here (Portugal), France still refuses to allow electrical lines passing through French territory from Spain and Portugal to sell power directly to the rest of the EU.
France is fine with buying themselves power from Portugal and Spain on the cheap to resell for more money to the rest of the EU or with selling power themselves to Spain and Portugal. Spain and Portugal have very good conditions for renewables, especially solar (for example, Portugal has twice the amount of peak sun exposure hours per year than Germany), so it makes sense to produce that kind of renewables here (on the other hand, things like hydro - which is still most of Portugal’s renewable energy generation - make a lot less sense since both countries are predicted to become much drier with global warming)
There are some crazy ideas to bypass France with a submarine cable in the Mediterranean Sea, but those are quite complex and costly.
I’ve also heard about the gas thing and the plan was to import gas from Northern Africa via Spain and sell it to the rest of Europe, as neither Spain nor Portugal produce gas. This would serve to reduce the dependency of, earlier, Russia gas and nowadays LPG from places like the US. That said I agree that we (Europe) need to wean ourselves of fossil fuels.
It doesnt really make sense for Portugal to be connected in any way but through Spain. It would require to build an underwater cable arbitrarily around Spain. if the Iberian peninsula would be better connected to the rest of the EU grid, maybe add an underwater cable to Italy in the mix, it could have made the difference to keep the grid afloat.
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