A widespread power outage on April 28 left millions without electricity across Spain, Portugal, Andorra, and parts of southern France, disrupting critical infrastructure, halting public transportation, and severing communications. The blackout began at 12:33 p.m. (CEST), but its root cause is still unclear.
“During the outage, all of Spain’s nuclear power plants and combined cycle gas plants stopped to operate, while renewables were still able to eventually provide power,” Antonio Delgado Rigal, CEO of Spain's AleaSoft Energy Forecasting, told pv magazine. “In some of the country’s areas, it took around 13 hours to restore power supply, although renewables were always able to operate.”
Although the cause of the blackout remains unknown, Delgado Rigal said that a cyberattack or external threat is unlikely.
“I would rather find the cause in a system failure, which is unable to cope with power network instability,” he explained. “The trigger was a frequency or voltage variation, an oscillation which happened somewhere and activated a domino effect in protection systems. This happened in a few seconds and is very difficult to manage.”
Many have blamed renewables for Spain’s grid instability following the blackout, but Delgado Rigal said that while renewables do contribute to instability, the core issue is that the power system remains unprepared to manage their growing share.
“All protections in Spanish grid are intended for turbine system and synchronism which are planned to work on a rotational scheme,” he added. “With renewables, this configuration may become a problem.”
Delgado Rigal noted that the event was likely related to power network instability and a failure in a system designed years ago for a different generation mix. A line issue in France was reported, but its exact role remains unclear, he added.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.