On April 28, Nieves Moral Alves was driving in her car when she heard that the power had gone out all over Spain. She rushed to her home in the mountain village of Oseja de Sahambre, but there she was surprised to find that everything was fine: the refrigerator, the lights, the oven. She saw on television what was happening outside the idyllic mountain area of 70 inhabitants. "I couldn't believe it - for decades we had problems with the power, and now it's the opposite. We had power, others didn't", the Spaniard tells the German public-law media ARD.
Power outage? We don't have such a thing.
Mayor Antonio Jaime Mendoza is modest, but he also feels proud - that he made sure that his five villages with a total of 130 residents experienced April 28 like any other day.
Before, the electricity in the villages was constantly out - sometimes because of heavy snowfall, sometimes because of strong winds. Alves remembers how years ago she spent 21 days without electricity - then her children were small and the woman desperately hoped for help from above.
Now everything is different. For over 15 years, in emergency situations, the electricity supply of the five villages has been separated from the national system. This is what happened on April 28 - when the power went out, within minutes the technicians on site switched to the backup system. And it works like this: it starts with diesel generators and connects to the grid. However, all external lines remain disconnected. After that, the local hydroelectric power plant was restarted and began to supply its energy only to the five villages, without going to the national grid.
Mayor Mendoza never imagined that the decision taken at the time would ever gain such fame. "Now it seems as if we have created an innovative model", ARD quotes him as saying.
Too much electricity from photovoltaics?
The electricity produced in the area is green - water-based. The villages themselves consume only 3-4 percent of it, the rest flows into the national grid. In the search for the causes of the large-scale power outage, attention was focused on green energy suppliers on the same day - but rather on photovoltaics and wind generators, the German public-law media outlet notes.
According to official data, on the day of the outage, 60.5 percent of the electricity in the Spanish grid came from renewable energies, slightly below the annual average of 66 percent.
For the first time this year, photovoltaics are expected to take a major place in the Spanish energy mix with 25 percent, closely followed by wind energy. The photovoltaic lobby indignantly rejects the accusations that this large share was the cause of the power outage.
But the Spanish Union of Renewable Energies admits that they have a weakness - they lack the so-called resilience that is provided by large rotating generators. If the power consumption in a given network suddenly drops, the generators help to prevent the frequency of the network from collapsing. This balances out short-term fluctuations in the electricity grid, explains the ARD.
Jose Maria González Moya from the Renewable Energy Union believes that this problem can be solved if the storage capacity of electrochemical batteries is increased in the future. "This will help to overcome these shortcomings of renewable energy sources and make them as reliable as traditional ones."
Another weak point: connectivity
Additional energy storage, for example through batteries and pumped storage power plants, is one side of the question. The other - according to experts - is the need for better connectivity with Europe, which Spain and Portugal need to work on.
"Weaker connectivity may be one of the factors that contributed to the peninsula becoming an absolute island when there is a power outage," energy expert Luis Bandesa told ARD. He points out that at least better connectivity with France could provide additional support for avoiding total power outages.
Bandesa explains that new cables are already being laid in northern Spain towards France for this purpose, but politically France has so far shown little interest in expanding the connections - due to the lower electricity prices on the Iberian Peninsula. If the connections are expanded, Spain and Portugal could increase the export of cheap energy and thus become serious competitors to the French nuclear fleet.
The disadvantages of the peripheral location
Even with better connectivity, however, the peripheral position of the Iberian Peninsula will remain a problem in the vast European electricity grid, believes Spanish Environment Minister Sara Agenes. Because turbulence in the European grid, such as what happened on April 28, particularly affects peripheral countries such as Spain or the Baltic states, she says.
The complexity of the European grid, along with the amount of data that needs to be analyzed, are among the reasons why it will take six months to fully clarify all the details of the case, the minister said. That is, politicians will have enough time to argue about the right energy mix and a possible reversal of Spain's decision to abandon nuclear energy, ARD points out.
And the village of Oseja de Sahambre? Mayor Mendoza is aware that his model is not suitable for the entire complex European electricity market. But at least in his village, no one is afraid of another blackout.
Author: Christina Böcker (ARD)