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Spain and Portugal are still reeling from the largest power cut in recent European history, which struck just after midday yesterday. With power supplies mostly back to normal, attention is now focused on what caused the incident. 

Speculation is rife, and some commentators have been quick to blame renewables, which now make up a large share of both countries’ power mixes. 

“Net-zero blamed for blackout chaos” proclaimed one headline from UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph, but none of the experts quoted in the article appear to draw that conclusion, and the exact cause remains a mystery.

Speaking on Tuesday morning, the Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica’s head of services Eduardo Prieto said that preliminary investigations have ruled out a cybersecurity attack – as some had initially feared.

Spain’s national meteorological office, Aemet, also appears to have ruled out extreme weather as a trigger. “During the day of 28 April, no unusual meteorological or atmospheric phenomena were detected, and nor were there sudden variations in the temperature in our network of meteorological stations,” it said in a statement this morning.

With these potential causes discounted, here’s what experts are saying about renewables in the Iberian grid and what role they played in Monday’s mass power outage. 

What happened to Spain’s renewables during the blackout?

Data from the Spanish grid operator’s website showed the dramatic drop in demand yesterday, shortly after 12.30pm, when it nosedived from 25GW to 10GW in an instant.

Prieto said that two consecutive events – one at 12.32pm on Monday and another just a second-and-a-half later – pointed to a “generation disconnection” that had cut off the supply across the peninsula.

While the system weathered the first event, it reportedly could not cope with the second.

The operator’s head of services noted that the problem started in southwest Spain, which is where much of the country’s solar energy is generated.

Some experts have previously voiced concern that Spain’s grid needs to be upgraded to cope with the rapid integration of solar and wind. But others stress the unlikelihood of the mass blackout being down to the intermittent renewables, which the Spanish and Portuguese operators are by now adept at handling. 

Spanish energy think tank Fundacion Renovables explains that renewable power plants with 2MW of power generation or more were disconnected because of a disturbance in the frequency of the power grid – as per national safety protocols. 

Essentially, the disturbance was “a consequence and not a cause”, it said in a statement. 

“The fact that Spain has a high production of electricity from renewable sources has no link to the grid failures that occurred on Monday,” it adds. “We regret that an extremely serious situation is being taken advantage of to spread falsehoods and generate disinformation in an already very complex situation for all affected citizens.”

In a press conference earlier today, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called claims that renewable energy was to blame for the outage “lies”, attacking those who linked the blackout to Spain’s use of wind and solar. 

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“Those linking the blackout to the lack of nuclear power are either lying or demonstrating their ignorance,” he said.

Sánchez announced that the government has set up a commission to investigate the incident and will be examining the role of private energy companies.

Solar helped Spain’s electricity system recover

Advocates of renewable energy emphasise that solar and wind are reliable energy sources, and go hand-in-hand with energy security. 

Stephen Jarvis, assistant professor in environmental economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, was tracking the grid changes yesterday as Spain attempted to bring the grid back online. He observed that solar, wind and hydro were still delivering energy in Spain, at a time when nuclear, gas and coal were totally offline.

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Far from being the cause of the peninsula’s woes, Fundacion Renovables states that the large percentage of renewable energy in Spain and the flexibility of hydropower systems enabled the nation to react and recover more quickly.

“If Spain had not had so much renewable capacity, the return to normality of the grid would have been longer in time,” it adds.

As investigations into the main grid outage continue, CEO of Global Solar Council Sonia Dunlop noted that solar also has an important role to play during power cuts. 

“If you have rooftop solar and storage on your home or business, and if it is wired up to be able to work off-grid, then you are much more resilient to blackouts,” she posted on X yesterday.

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“Solar and storage provide resilience to climate impacts, natural disasters and more. If heatwaves and freak weather are going to lead to more blackouts, it might be worth more people installing solar in such a way that it can go into island mode.”

The incident has also prompted discussion on the Iberian Peninsula’s status as an ‘energy island’ within the EU, given it is relatively disconnected from the rest of the bloc.

It remains to be fully analysed whether closer links with Europe’s grids could have aided Spain and Portugal – or put more countries at risk.