Less than two weeks ago, Spain bragged about hitting 100% renewable power on the national grid. And then the entire Iberian Peninsula lost electricity on Monday. Are the two things related?
The network responsible, REN, is saying the outage was due to a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” but they haven’tt name it. Was it solar flares? Was it temperature fluctuations? Who knows because they’re just telling us that it was something unnamed and rare.
They did say that the problem happened on the Spanish side of the border coming from high temperature variations and “anomalous oscillations” in high voltage lines. Well, that was reported in the renewable energy story. It says that solar reached new records just last week. Could these variations be responsible for the grid’s response?
Solar fluctuations could in theory set the stage for a crash, especially if solar production spiked or dropped very quickly. It could create a highly unstable environment where even modest disruptions (technical, cyber, weather) could cause an outage.
Journalist Michael Shellenberger reports that in 2024, cybersecurity researchers warned that vulnerabilities in widely used solar inverter models could allow mass remote shutdowns but those warnings were not heeded.
Power was restored late Monday but is still not completely restored throughout the region. Grocery stores are empty, schools were canceled, cash machines were out, people were stranded in elevators and on trains in the middle of nowhere. It was utter pandemonium but don’t expect a real answer from European leaders as to why this happened.
