In September of 2022, amid fears about the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Europe’s energy supply, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez told his country’s Senate: “There will never be blackouts in Spain.”
Monday’s massive outage, which left the country without power for about 11 hours, has shown the Socialist leader to be wrong in his assertion – and some of his critics have even used his words as proof that the government’s entire energy policy is wrong-headed.
On Tuesday, the conservative People’s Party, which has been advocating for the extension of the life of nuclear plants, said the blackout had shown that a debate about greater use of nuclear power had become necessary.
“Sooner or later, in this country we shall have to reflect seriously regarding our nuclear energy reality, without extremist positions, with common sense, balance and reality,” said Carlos Mazón, president of the Valencia region.
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Spain has five nuclear plants in operation, compared to 15 in neighbouring France. Just a week ago, the government had approved the dismantling of the Almaraz plant in Cáceres as part of a broader strategy to shift away from nuclear power.
Meanwhile, capacity in renewables has increased enormously. Total wind generation has doubled since 2008, and solar energy has risen by a factor of eight during that period, leaving Spain with the second-largest renewables infrastructure among EU members. The removal of regulatory obstacles has accelerated this phenomenon, and the Sánchez government has laid out ambitious targets, such as covering 81 per cent of national electricity needs with renewables by 2030 (Portugal has set a target of 93 per cent).
The cause of the blackout is still not clear. But with Red Eléctrica, which manages the Spanish grid, revealing that a glitch that preceded the outage originated in the southwest of the country, a hub of solar-energy generation, the government’s renewables strategy is under scrutiny.
However, Sánchez roundly rejected the nuclear argument.
“Those who are linking this incident to a lack of nuclear plants quite frankly either are lying or are simply showing their ignorance,” he said. The prime minister attributed what he said was the swift restoration of electricity supply to the co-operation of France and Morocco, hydroelectric power and combined cycle generation.
“If we had had greater nuclear dependency, the recovery would not have been as quick,” he said.
The blackout has also underlined the relative isolation of Spain and particularly Portugal from the European grid. In 2022, that status allowed the two countries to negotiate jointly a so-called “Iberian exception” with the European Commission, which meant they could cap the reference price of gas used to generate electricity as a way of reducing consumers’ energy bills.
However, Monday’s dramatic events – which left Spain, and therefore Portugal, totally cut off from the European grid – show how problematic that isolation can be.
