Southern Spain outages preceded nationwide blackout: Report

Power failures in southern Spain preceded a nationwide blackout that left millions in the dark two weeks ago, according to the most detailed report yet on the events leading up to the debacle. 

About 2.2 gigwatts of capacity went offline in the south of Spain less than a minute before the complete collapse of the Iberian Peninsula’s electricity systems, Entso-e, an umbrella organization for Europe’s transmission system operators, said in a preliminary report.

Pouring through data

The Spanish government has yet to come out with findings on why the outage took place, saying it’s still looking into the data from power generators and the grid operator.

The blackout left millions without electricity and brought down telephone communication, trains and traffic lights in Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France last month. Entso-e noted that there were no power trips in Portugal or France. 

Following the Entso-e report, RBC Capital Markets said the most likely culprits were solar farms in the south of Spain. 

“The more likely candidate to initiate the blackout was a series of disconnections of 2.2 GW of solar PV plants in the South or Southwest of Spain,” analysts at RBC said in a note on Monday.

Spain has seen solar capacity grow hugely in recent years, experiencing record negative prices when cheap solar flooded the power grid this year.

Often, these solar assets are grid-following and not grid-forming, which would have enabled them to stabilise the power frequency.

“We believe this is likely to result in the adoption of grid-forming inverters for solar PV assets,” The RBC analysts said.