Life is returning to normal across Europe after a massive power outage plunged Spain and Portugal back into the dark-ages and interrupted electric exports to southern France.
The cause of the breakdown has now been blamed on the failure of two Solar power stations in the South of Spain.
Red Electrica, the power company involved in the incident, said they had identified two power generation loss incidents associated with the generation of electricity that involved solar power plants according to a report carried by Reuters.
Spain is one of Europe’s leaders in renewable electricity supply with about 60% of the country’s supply coming from solar and 12% from wind at the time of the incident.
They are also an exporter of electricity via the European Grid. Of course, this incident has sparked a fierce debate about the over reliance on a supply that is so volatile and if this makes the supply vulnerable.
The most common cause of a power outage of this sort is the weather, Red Electricia went straight for that excuse. “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high-voltage lines, a phenomenon known as induced atmospheric vibration,” an official press announcement from them reported by the BBC.
“These oscillations caused synchronization failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”
Trouble is, there was no extreme weather with the Spanish metrological agency (AEMET) issuing a statement saying that they had no record of any unusuak metrological or atmospheric phenomena and no sudden temperature fluctuations at any of their weather stations.
In February Red Electricia were already sounding the warning bells in their annual report when they stated “disconnections due to the high penetration of renewables without the technical capacities necessary for an adequate response in the face of disturbances”.
In other words, renewable power tends to be a little to volatile to rely on.
The investment bank RBC think that the outage will cost the country in the region of 4.5 billion Euros and went on to criticize the Spanish Government for being complacent about the precarious state the country’s infrastructure is in without the technical capacity in the face of unusual disturbances.
This is of course the first time that an outage of this scale has happened and it appear to be for a simple reason, the sun stopped shining and the wind stopped blowing. Like we didn’t see that one coming.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not against renewable energy in fact I am all for it, but, as a part of the mix. The problem is we cannot fully control it and thus we need to have back-up generators idling just in case there is problem and guess what, these put up the cost of our electricity as we need to have so much redundancy in the system.
It really feels that we have stopped evolving and began the process of regressing.
