Spanish power utilities lobby Aelec on Monday blamed the grid operator REE’s poor planning for the massive blackout that hit Spain and Portugal on April 28, rejecting the earlier REE claim that power plants were responsible.
This third analysis of the outage was delivered in a report by independent experts hired by Aelec, which represents Spain’s main electricity companies including Iberdrola and Endesa.
Two previous reports by the government and REE said some conventional power plants – thermal plants using coal, gas and nuclear – failed to help maintain an appropriate voltage on April 28. REE drew the conclusion these failures led to the surge in voltage that ultimately caused the blackout.
In the run-up to the outage, other anomalies included some power plants disconnecting even though voltage in the system was within legal limits, REE said.
Aelec’s chair Marina Serrano told reporters the country’s power plants had complied with the orders they received from REE, a unit of Redeia, during the blackout.
Conventional power plants acted in line with existing regulation and requirements, she said.
Serrano called for further investigation, including on the management of the interconnection with France.
“We regret that Red Electrica has launched a generalised accusation against hundreds of power generation companies,” she said.
Redeia on Monday defended its planning for that day and its management of the interconnection with France. It also called on Aelec to draw on data from the companies it represents to give “technical and rigorous answers” to the previous reports’ findings on conventional plants’ voltage control failures and other plants disconnecting incorrectly.
The Energy Ministry on Monday referred to Energy Minister Sara Aagesen’s comments last week.
The experts from consultancy Compass Lexecon and research institute Inesc Tec who drew up the latest report said they had not analysed whether conventional plants did their job in regulating voltage.
Moreover, the experts were unable to access all the data from power plants disconnecting in the first seconds of the blackout.
Aelec regulation chief Marta Castro said such data is confidential and the country’s competition and energy watchdog CNMC is analysing it.
“What we can say is that there is evidence that there was not enough conventional generation, regardless of this non-compliance issue,” said Compass Lexecon’s Anton Garcia Diaz.
As for the disconnections, “it seems unlikely that so many failures would occur in so many plants simultaneously,” he said.
“These failures seems more a consequence than a cause, a consequence of a systemic failure,” he added.
Separately on Monday, Spanish competition and energy watchdog told energy firms they cannot raise the price of fixed-price electricity supply contracts to make customers pay the higher costs tied to the extra-safety mode the Spanish power system is running on since the blackout.
(Reporting by Pietro Lombardi)
