Spain‘s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has hit back at those who blame his government’s energy policy for the blackout that affected the Iberian Peninsula on April 28th, although he has still not explained what caused the outage.
Spain and Portugal were plunged into an electricity blackout that lasted several hours after they were disconnected from the European grid. The power loss, which also affected mobile phone coverage, caused travel chaos and the closure of schools, universities, shops and businesses. Portugal’s electricity supply depends on Spain’s connection to the European grid.
Spain’s Socialist-led government has not ruled out any possibility regarding the cause and it has called for patience as an investigation is carried out.
“I know that Spaniards want to know what happened and they want to know as soon as possible,” Mr Sánchez said as he addressed Spain’s congress for the first time since the blackout, before warning that this “will take time”.
He praised Spaniards and institutions for their response to the crisis, saying it had brought out “the best of the Spanish people”.
Mr Sánchez confirmed that three “disturbances” in the national grid had preceded the disconnection. The first, he said, was in southern Spain and the second two, which occurred just moments before the outage, were in the southwest, where much of the country’s solar energy is generated.
The revelation, soon after the blackout, about the location of the latter two network glitches had triggered speculation that the blackout may have been caused by a solar generation overload.
The outage has also revived calls from the conservative opposition for the government to halt its nuclear phase-out plan.
“You were so intent on being the greenest in the world that you have led Spaniards into the dark,” said Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the main opposition People’s Party. “Your duty is to accept that your energy model has failed.”
The leader of the far-right Vox party, Santiago Abascal, ridiculed the prime minister and accused him of “playing at being Mr Solar Panel”.
However, Mr Sánchez said that “there is no empirical evidence telling us that the incident was caused by an excess of renewables or a lack of nuclear power stations”.
The nuclear debate, he said, was irrelevant in this context.
“Linking this blackout to nuclear plants is not just irresponsible, it is also enormously manipulative,” he said.
Earlier this week, the EU commissioner for energy and housing, Dan Jørgensen, congratulated the governments of Spain and Portugal for their response to the crisis and said “there is no reason to believe” that renewables had caused the power loss.
Spain has increased its renewable output substantially since Mr Sánchez took office in 2018 and when the blackout happened, two-thirds of the country’s electricity needs were being met by solar and wind generation.
