296: The Spanish Grid Goes Down: Are renewables really to blame?

Full Transcript

Tom : [00:00:02] Hello and welcome to Outrage and Optimism. I'm Tom Rivett-Carnac

Christiana: [00:00:05] I'm Christiana Figueres

Paul: [00:00:06] And I'm Paul Dickinson.

Tom : [00:00:08] This week we talk about the potential climate leadership of a new pope. And we ask what really happened in the recent blackout that impacted Spain and Portugal. Thanks for being here. Hi, friends. So the main thing we want to get to today is the recent blackouts that swept across the Iberian Peninsula a couple of weeks ago, and there's been so much chatter in the last couple of weeks about really what was the cause and disinformation and information. We'll get into all of that in a minute. But first of all, Cristiana, a couple of weeks ago, you recorded a beautiful tribute to Pope Francis, who, of course passed away, where you read out parts of the Profiles of Paris submission that he gave us around the work that went into creating the Paris Agreement. And, of course, the Pope was a remarkable leader on climate change. He really provided spiritual direction, depth, vision in a manner that was enormously helpful. And it's been a big question. Who were we going to get to replace it? So I thought, first of all, before we kick off, we should just look a little bit for a minute at Pope Leo the 14th, who was recently nominated by the conclave to be the new pope. I'm going to dive in a little bit into what he's previously said on climate, but would either of you like to start with any comments?

Christiana: [00:01:18] Well, the two pillars that we saw being constantly interwoven by the previous pope on his opinion on climate were nature and poverty, because both of those were so important to him. He chose his name because he felt very, very close to nature, and he felt a true sense of responsibility to protect creation, to use his term. But he also understood that if we don't protect nature, that it is actually going to hurt the poor much more than the top of the pyramid. He understood that very clearly. And so his allegiance to both. Alleviation of poverty and to protecting nature is what kept him so close to climate issues. Will that carry over to the new pope? We don't know.

Tom : [00:02:16] We don't know. And one of the things you learn as soon as you look into this is that who people have been before they become pope is not necessarily who they are as pope. And that's true even of Francis, who was much more conservative in many of his views before he became head of the Catholic Church, at which point he, of course, as you say, became such a remarkable leader. Now, there's a few things to say here, though. The new pope, the first with a US passport that is historic in and of itself, and quite interesting when you consider the fact that one of the things Francis did precipitate was a bit of a pushback from us Catholics who felt that he was too aligned to liberal issues. So that's interesting whether he will be able to reach out more and be a more compelling message even than Francis to us Catholics. But he has over the years really advocated for environmental advocacy. Just a couple of years ago, he has been emphasizing the urgency of the transition and in particular saying we need to move from words to action on climate. He has pointed out that the moral responsibility to care for the environment is about a respectful and reciprocal relationship with nature. Looking at the interconnectedness of poverty and social crises and the environmental issues, he has been leading much of the work at the Vatican to adopt solar panels and electric vehicles, transition their endowments. And he's also, of course, spent much of his life in Peru and has shown a strong commitment to protecting the Amazon rainforest and supporting indigenous communities. So all of those factors can make us very hopeful that this will be a pope that continues that legacy of leadership. But as you say, Christiana, we just don't know who he will become now that he's in that role.

Paul: [00:03:56] This sort of extraordinary juxtaposition of 2 billion people of faith in the Catholic Church taking very seriously the the leadership of somebody whose role is to help us think holistically and and comprehensively with the juxtaposition of the the US president issuing a photoshopped picture of himself as pope. You know, I mean, he's always grabbing the headlines by being kind of an idiot, but it does sort of emphasize childishness versus the the serious and important issues of humanity behaving towards itself and, and broader nature in life with respect and dignity.

Paul: [00:04:32] Mhm.

Tom : [00:04:33] Yeah. And of course, using his first mass, which happened just this previous Sunday to call for an end to war, there's just a lot of positives there that we have not lost. Of course we've lost a great pope, but maybe we still have the moral leadership that we so desperately need because of course, it's kind of a thin list when you look at those people who can really call power to account on the global stage. So just to kick this off, I'm sure all listeners will be aware of this at a top end. But on the 28th of April, a massive power outage swept across the Iberian Peninsula, affecting millions of people in one of the most severe blackouts in European history. Within just five seconds, Spain lost approximately 15GW of power, around 60% of its national electricity supply, causing a chain reaction that also disrupted parts of Portugal, southern France and Andorra. This blackout hit major urban centers and disrupted transport emergency services. And honestly, the cause is still under investigation. But some early reports suggest a fault in the high voltage transmission lines that triggered cascading failures. However, at the time of the outage, renewables made up 64% of Spain's electricity generation. And as ever again in these critical moments, those interests who want to try to slow down the transition to renewable grids and shift away from fossil fuels were very quick to pounce on that and say, the cause here is renewables. It's the intermittent nature of sources like wind and solar. To try to suggest this is more complicated and difficult than we thought. So let's get into this. And of course we should stay at the top end. There is an investigation ongoing. There are multiple potential causes that may be identified definitively through the investigation as to what really caused this. And we're having this conversation in advance of that report coming out. So we don't really know Christiana. I know that for many years, you sat on the board of a large Spanish renewable energy company. I wonder if we can speak to anyone there about this.

Christiana: [00:06:27] Well, indeed. How did you know?

Tom : [00:06:31] Because you always seem to be in Madrid whenever I was talking to you.

Christiana: [00:06:35] Yeah, I did reach out to Jose Manuel Canales, who is the CEO of both Acciona and Acciona in it here. And it is headquartered in Spain, multinational small conglomerate which is dedicated to the development and management of infrastructure and energy, but only renewable energy, operating in about 40 countries of the world and produces. Last I saw about 21 terawatt hours of renewable electricity around the world and is the major producer of renewable energy in Spain and on the Iberian Peninsula. So I did reach out to him because I do remember being on the board of Acciona. How many times? Many times. Jose Manuel said, you know, the bane of our existence is not producing energy. It's transporting energy. Because these companies that produce electricity, they're not responsible for transporting it. They depend on these grids that we've been talking about. And he was constantly saying, we will reach a moment in which these grids will collapse in front of us. And that is as far as we will be able to go until there is decent investment into the grids. I don't know how many times I heard that from him, so I did reach out to him to ask him what is his opinion about what happened with these blackouts, and does this prove the point that he has been arguing for so many years? Here's what he said.

Jose Manuel Canales: [00:08:16] It's a hugely complex situation that I am in. Not a very good position to make because of course, I'm not the grid operator, I'm just Acciona. It's just a generator. So what I'm giving you is my own assessment of the events, information that I'm gathering from around the place, from the technicians and specialists, and it will take. Now they're saying it's going to take about six months to clarify Exactly what happened and why it happened. Let me just run very briefly and in general terms over the over the course of events. It was a sunny day, so we were generating about 65% from renewables, mostly from PV. In fact, we've had a number of days where we were generating over 80%. So that was a normal, a normal situation. Now, half hours before the blackout, the European system operators had experience to over tension, over power and over frequency events, which didn't actually they didn't give a lot of importance. It wasn't. I mean, they managed to cover out those distortions in the in the grid and nothing really too serious happened. And I don't know if the fact that they occurred in a couple of hours or within the hour before the blackout has anything to do with the blackout. Honestly, I don't know. Now what did happen and what it seems. The reason for the falling of the castle of cards is a disconnection of over 2000MW of generation capacity. We believe in Extremadura in the south of Spain.

Jose Manuel Canales: [00:09:59] It's believed that the disconnection occurred there. So over 2000MHz of we believe. Then again, not absolutely sure PV disconnected. The reason why those generation facilities disconnected from the grid. No one really knows. And in fact, that is the main objective of the current investigations. So if and when these two plants disconnect, there's a sudden tension peak in the grid in Extremadura. And we're entering the area of my own opinion. It may be that the connection between the generation points Extremadura and the south, when there's a lot of PV, because a lot sunnier, of course, and the demand points in the North is actually somewhat a tense grid because a lot of electricity is flowing from the south towards the north. Now, that may have created an over tension situation, and it may have contributed to the falling of other regions, other generation points. Whether the 2.2 disconnection in Extremadura should have been isolated. That is a very good question, but I do don't have an answer. I don't think anyone has an answer. At least there's no public answer. Onto why that wasn't isolated. One would think that we should be able to manage a 2.2GW disconnection in a network that's actually generating 32GW. Anyway, the whole thing started falling and we had to disconnect many of our plants, all of our plants, because there was the system had completely it was completely unbalanced. So we had to disconnect and the whole system fell apart.

Jose Manuel Canales: [00:11:51] It's remarkable, however, how fast the protocols of reconnection and reloading started and how efficient that was by one, actually. We re-energised the Morocco Spain line by 135. Spain and France. Interconnection was re-established and by say 4:00, which is quite surprisingly fast, at least to me. Portugal was stabilizing its network, restarting its network, and the connection was started in Spain. So by midnight, most of us had power. I think that was quite remarkable. To be totally honest, I don't think there's been huge Damage in the event other than the using of this event to criticize renewables. The truth is, this is my own very personal comment here. Politically incorrect too. I think it's actually good that we remember how important having a continuous supply of electricity is for a society, so that we don't take it for granted, and that we realize how lucky we are to have a constant flow of electricity coming into a system which, by the way, doesn't happen in that many countries anymore. And in the Spanish case, where we're generating, in normal circumstances, 60% of our needs from renewable sources or creating a huge degree of energy independence and affordable energy prices is a blessing that cannot be in any way tarnished by this event. Let's not use it as a political or a ideological tool because it's a very technical, it's a very technical event which needs to be analyzed over the next few months.

Tom : [00:13:45] Christiana, thank you so much for getting an analyst to send that in. I mean, how interesting to have a direct assessment from someone so deeply involved. And clearly there's a lot more to learn in the coming weeks and months as we try and identify the true causes here and how we find a path forward. But which of you would like to kick off with a few thoughts about what's really going on here and how we should respond?

Christiana: [00:14:04] Yeah. So as Jose Manuel Gonzalez explains, the investigation into the blackout is ongoing and it could take a while to finally understand what happened. In the meantime, it might be helpful to begin to soften or maybe even dispel some of the rumors surrounding the blackout. One immediate rumor that was spread is that it was a cyberattack. Well, we won't know for sure until the investigation concludes, but for the time being, there is no evidence that there was a cyber or terrorist attack. Another rumor that was spread by those opposed to the energy transition is that it was due to the high participation of renewable energy in the Spanish electric grid. Once again, we have to wait for the conclusion of the investigation. But the fact is that Spain frequently has even higher percentage of renewable energy than that which was on the day of the blackout, and that renewable energy flows through the grid system. And Spain has never had an overall blackout. Even with higher percentages of renewable energy. So it is possible that the blackout will eventually find its source in a technical failure, or a series of failures within the complex system of electricity transportation, rather than with any source of generation of electricity. Now, just to clarify, electricity is produced at many point sources from many different types of fuel and renewable energies.

Christiana: [00:16:00] Usually the production of electricity. That generation is far away from the places where it is actually needed or consumed. So the electric grid is a complex system that takes the electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed or used, and an electric grid is made up of both transmission lines and distribution lines. Transmission lines are built to transport high voltage electricity over long distances. And distribution lines are built for short distance, low voltage delivery of electricity. To homes and buildings. The entire grid system, including the purchase of electricity from generators, the transport over long distances, the delivery over short distances to final users, and the sale of excess energy when excess is being produced and is on the grid network. All of that needs to be in balance, and that balance needs to exist for the grid to maintain its stability. When that balance is lost, inbuilt protection systems of the grid network automatically disconnect. In order to safeguard the infrastructure. But grid operators are usually technically prepared for only one element failing. So two or more technical failures of the Spanish grid and its interconnection to neighbouring Portugal, Morocco and France is one likely explanation of what happened on the Iberian Peninsula. But once again, we have to wait for the investigation results

Paul: [00:17:47] That's a brilliant summary, Christiana, and I know you have quite some experience of the industry. In fact. I mean, I'm just dazzled by one fact here, which is that at the time of the outage, renewables made up roughly 64% of Spain's electricity generation. And I don't think they were at fault. But we should just celebrate that amazing number 64% of an entire nation's electricity coming completely for free from the sun and the wind. Now, there are issues around this, and they're not necessarily intermittency. There was no evidence that intermittency was necessarily the problem in Spain. But just as Christiana says, the power grid has not moved with time and I'm at a sort of meta level. I'm fascinated that in decades of working on climate change, how little grids have really come up as a regular topic of discussion. And I think the main reason for that is because they sit very often behind a central national government, and there'll be a sort of ministry for oversight of electricity. And, you know, just as your friends or neighbors might put solar on their roof or have an electric car, that's something very tangible about climate change. We can all see wind farms, you know, in the sea or on the land or something. The grid is sort of invisible, both economically and politically and technologically. And so we don't think about it so much. But it is an absolutely fascinating machine. It's very complex in some ways. But I mean, principally, it's had big generators for the last hundred plus years, rotating, producing this power in a kind of regulated way.

Paul: [00:19:23] And of course, when you have a solar farm, for example, there isn't a big generator. There's actually just electricity coming out of the solar farm, and it's going into what people call an inverter, and then it's going on to the grid. And so a couple of issues that we're realizing now are that grids, first of all, just as Christiana said, with this two way electricity, they need to have kind of technological oversight, for want of a better word. They need to have information so that the national control of the grid can deal with all these different sources. And they need battery storage. Um, there's some evidence that, um, there wasn't as much storage necessarily in Spain as, as there is, for example, in the UK. And that's often to do with market instruments that it's much more profitable to be running storage commercially in the UK, and you can sell at higher prices and make more money and that that gets more investment. I mean, there could be, as you know, as much as up to ten times more battery storage in the UK than Spain simply because of market mechanisms. Organisms. But I think above all, it's really just having a way for our societies to prioritise the extraordinary potential of this. And, you know, there was a great interview, actually, with the chief executive of Octopus Energy, Greg Jackson, that I listened to, and he was pointing out that, you know, electric vehicles, for example, are sort of five times cheaper than than petrol vehicles, depending on what cost you buy the power at.

Paul: [00:20:42] I mean, there's certainly at least half the price of petrol vehicles in terms of fuel costs. That fact means that the petrol cars are on their way out. You know, everyone across the world will tell you how important gas prices are for vehicles. You know, it's like a political factor in US elections. So the fact that we've got a car that runs on half the price for energy means that we're going to have more and more electric vehicles. Now, on the one hand, that's more and more demands on the grid, more and more opportunity for renewable energy to give us free electricity. And as Christiana pointed out, more and more opportunity actually for millions of cars to provide us with gigantic batteries, and we can solve the problem of a modern grid. But just to finish on this explanatory journey, it's a very, very different grid in 2025 to 1 in 1925, when 1925 you got big rotating generators at about ten power stations that power your country. And in 2025, I spoke to somebody from E.ON who says they've got 45 million people on their grid. They're connecting a new customer or generator every eight seconds. So, you know, the modern grid is a super complex, super devolved. And I think we can all I'm personally enjoying starting to go deep into grids because it's part of actual national energy strategy. And, you know, whether you become a kind of a successful electro state with, you know, low cost energy is in part dependent upon your grid and how you develop your grid.

Tom : [00:22:09] Definitely, definitely. And I think, Paul, the interesting thing that you said there about the different and you, Christiana, the different nature of grids now a hundred years later with distributed generation and what that looks like, I think that's such a key point. But I would just complement that with an additional point, which is to say that even if we weren't in some fantasy world shifting to renewables, the traditional grids are already too old and would require investment and transformation. So to expect the transition to renewables to cover the entire cost of this new grid and to place the responsibility of that on renewables, when this legacy grid was actually created through public funding that then enabled everybody to get connected to the grid in the early days, is to use economics in a manner to disadvantage this transformation, because many of those costs would be baked in anyway. I think that's kind of an important point. Now, I wonder if we should call a real expert who can help us think this through. And I wonder if what you both think about Kingsmill bond. So Kingsmill is yeah. Yeah is brilliant and is known to both of you and to many listeners as a former guest on this podcast. He was formerly at RMI, the Rocky Mountain Institute, and he's now an energy strategist at Ember, leading their Energy Futures initiative.

Tom : [00:23:28] He analyzes the future of the energy system as it transitions from fossil fuels to renewables. 25 years of experience as a financial market analyst. What Kingsmill is so compelling about, and this speaks to his very impressive career, is just really nailing the unstoppable nature of this transition and the underlying dynamics that make it possible. So maybe we should just give him a quick call and then we can see what we learned from the conversation. Please join us in a moment. Kingsmill, how are you doing? Welcome back to the podcast. Thanks very much for having me. We're really, really appreciate you hopping on at short notice. There's so many things that we can talk about, as evidenced by our previous conversations, which have been very popular on outrage and optimism, but particularly today, we wanted to dig into some issues around what's been happening in Spain. So I'll just hop in if that's all right. We're now two weeks past these blackouts. What have you been hearing about how industry insiders have been talking about the blackouts, and how has that changed over the last couple of weeks? 

Kingsmill Bond: [00:24:27] So the Initial thing we heard was for all the fossil fuel folk, some shouting about how it was the fault of renewables.

Tom : [00:24:33] That came quickly and loudly. I had my memory of that.

Kingsmill Bond: [00:24:35] Yeah.

Paul: [00:24:36] Preparation is everything right?