Spain’s Power Grid Spending Fell Behind as Solar Energy Boomed

Article content

Grid operator Red Electrica says it has significantly increased investment in the network to adapt it to the requirements of the energy transition. The company invested €1.1 billion ($1.2 billion) last year and plans to spend €1.4 billion in 2025, it said in a written reply to questions. Investment will total more than €4.2 billion from 2021 to 2025.

Article content

Aging System

Article content

Most of Spain’s grid equipment was built and installed decades ago. That means substations — the nodes that connect the different electricity lines — weren’t designed to handle the high variability inherent in wind and solar power.

Article content

The government, like others in Europe, limits the amount of money companies can spend on power networks to prevent excessive costs being passed on to consumers. It’s now considering whether it should raise the cap, noting that the current limits were set more than a decade ago, before the huge renewables rollout.

Article content

The Ministry of Environmental Transition says Spain’s grid is among the world’s most robust and investment fits with renewables growth and the country’s needs. When investing in the network, the government focuses on making sure it can support new industrial projects as well as strengthening the system overall, a ministry spokesperson said in an emailed response to questions.

Article content

Article content

Iberia also differs from the rest of Europe in terms of cross-border connections. Cables between neighboring countries can be critical to balancing power systems, allowing a swift transfer of flows should a key source of generation shut off. 

Article content

But the peninsula is among the least interconnected areas in the region. Spain’s system is linked up to Portugal, France, Andorra and Morocco, yet the exchange capacity is only about 3 gigawatts. That’s less than 3% of total capacity, compared with a European Union target of 15% by 2030, according to the ministry. Spain can’t increase its connectivity by itself and the government hopes the issue will become a priority for the European Commission, the spokesperson said.

Article content

A new link being built to France will increase the interconnection to about 5 gigawatts when it comes online in 2027.

Article content

“Interconnections help because they help you balance,” said Janusz Bialek, a research fellow at Imperial College London. “If they had more connections with France, maybe they could have helped and solved the problems.”

Article content

Spain’s isolation contrasts with Great Britain, a literal island, which has multiple subsea links to almost all its nearest neighbors, including France, the Netherlands and Belgium. It also has connections across the North Sea to Norway and Denmark.

Article content

Article content

The importance of such joined-up markets was evident last winter when the country’s Danish link brought in extra electricity as a dearth of wind power left the grid with an insufficient buffer of supply.

Article content

Grid Balancing

Article content

As more and more of Spain’s power comes from renewables, the nation may also need to invest more in storage — its installed battery capacity is far below that of the UK — and grid-balancing services.

Article content

Reliance on renewables has increasingly raised questions around a lack of “inertia,” a term referring to the energy created by rotating generators at conventional power plants, which is used to maintain frequency.

Article content

The network operator has described a series of disruptions over just a few seconds that plunged the country into darkness on Monday. But before that, the system was already under stress: The frequency of the grid had started to fluctuate unusually just after noon, half an hour before the blackout occurred.

Article content

Frequency is the “heartbeat” of the grid, and has traditionally been kept steady by inertia provided by fossil-fuel, nuclear and hydropower plants. But Spain was using little of those sources Monday afternoon, instead getting most of its electricity from solar panels.