On April 28, from 12:30 p.m. until after midnight, much of the Iberian Peninsula suffered a power grid Blackout (with B) that had consequences similar to a natural disaster, albeit without casualties. In the absence of a final report, you already have a precise idea of what happened and why it happened. More importantly, there are lessons that need to be learned from that event.
With the Blackout it was confirmed that energy, and in particular electricity, is the food of the economy: without it, economic activity is reduced to almost zero due to the dependence that modern life has on electricity.
We are used to dividing electricity generation sources into renewables (sun, wind, water, geothermal and biomass), non-renewable (coal, hydrocarbons and their derivatives) and, separately, nuclear power. Metaphorically, renewable foods are “organic” foods and non-renewable fast foods, with the difference that the former are healthier, but more expensive and seasonal, while the latter are cheaper and can be found all year round everywhere.
The first lesson of Blackout is to learn to distinguish energy sources in another way: into “intermittent” and unpredictable (e.g., solar and wind farms) and “constant” and reliable (e.g., nuclear, thermoelectric, and hydroelectric). Spain, due to its geographical conditions, has opted for the former, ensuring that generation costs are lower than those of “constant” sources. As a result, the latter have been relegated in favor of intermittent ones. In fact, at the time of the blackout, several thermoelectric plants were shut down and cold because their energy was more expensive than solar photovoltaic (it was noon!), which represented, with other renewables, 70% of consumption. An unexpected consequence was that the oscillations of intermittent energies could not be properly managed, “the fuses” blew and the result was catastrophic.
Therefore, a second lesson is that intermittent renewables are good and cheap, but they need a robust distribution network, with a varied generation matrix (like a good menu) and substantial investments to stabilize fluctuations and store excess energy produced (read, more expensive bills).
In short, the blame for the power outage was not on renewables, much less on the energy transition, but on the weak management of the grid which, another limitation, is not even adequately integrated into the European grid, which could have given a helping hand to recover. Hence a third lesson: the complexity of electricity grids and the possibility of blackouts due to various causes, including natural ones, makes it necessary to interconnect with neighboring countries.
Finally, even distributed generation, that of private houses and companies, designed for self-consumption but used to sell electricity to the grid, was disconnected with the Blackout, for safety reasons, thwarting the wait of those users to resort to “their” electricity. Of course, this dependence on the external network can be technically managed to avoid this inconvenience, but it costs a lot.
Finally, there are also lessons for Bolivia: the depletion of gas reserves and the failure of sterile statism force it to bet on the renewable sources at its disposal, firm and intermittent. But this urgent transition must be made intelligently: with a varied menu, with the support of combined cycle thermal power plants and with digitized grid management systems. Above all, with an opening to constructive private capital that the MAS model has not been able to give.