Best Posts in Thread: Europes Big Brown Out

In Spain, there has been a revolution in electricity production over the past decade, with renewable technologies (mainly solar and wind) now accounting for a large proportion of the electricity supply,” said the former director general of Red Eléctrica, Jordi Sevilla. He further pointed out that fossil, hydro and nuclear power all have heavy rotating generators. The stored energy in these generators, often called flywheel, helps keep the system running in the event of disruptions. Wind and solar power do not have such flywheel, making them much less capable of counteracting disruptions in the system. Needless to say, these warnings fell on deaf ears.

Just before the collapse, Spain had around 60 percent of its electricity supply from solar, ten percent each from wind and nuclear, and just under ten percent from fossil fuels. Red Eléctrica has communicated that the process started with the loss of production from two separate plants in less than two seconds. They were briefly able to parry the first outage, but when the second one came so soon after, the grid’s fate was sealed.

Eduardo Prieta, the chief operating officer of Red Eléctrica, said in an interview that it was very likely that the loss of solar power set off the chain of events that led to the collapse. Despite this, a number of experts and EU representatives quickly denied that renewable energy had anything to do with it, and urged against speculating about the causes.