Spain, Portugal blackouts show renewables ‘risks’ amid call for energy ‘balance’

Energy experts say Spain and Portugal’s widespread blackouts present risks for the renewable energy transition here, amid calls for a ‘balanced’ energy future and lifting of the nuclear ban.

A man sells battery-powered radios and torches on a Barcelona street during the blackout in Spain. Picture: AP

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Energy experts have warned the widespread blackouts in Spain and Portugal this week present risks for Australia amid its own transition to renewable energy, as leading Australian voices called for a ­“balanced and responsible energy future” and a lifting of the nuclear moratorium.

An open letter signed by leading figures like businessman Dick Smith, energy executive Trevor St Baker and nuclear physicist Sarah Lawley asked “if nuclear power is so uneconomic, why does it need to be banned?”.

“We’re calling for the lifting of the outdated and unscientific ban on nuclear energy and full transparency on funding and influence,” it reads.

“All advocacy groups shaping energy policy must declare their funding from foreign groups, renewable suppliers, or other vested interests.

“We call for an end to market bodies declaring a politically determined policy pathway to be ‘optimal’ or ‘least cost’ when they have not compared the pathway to a credible baseline or alter­native, and have failed to assess the full system costs.

“We must protect our farmland, our forests and oceans from reckless destruction and corporate welfare for renewable energy projects.”

It comes as Australia reacted to a sweeping blackout in Spain and Portugal that forced businesses, hospitals and other critical infrastructure onto back-up generators. Victoria Energy Policy Centre director Bruce Mountain said that while it was “early days” to diagnose the blackout on the Iberian Peninsula, Spain had suffered from transmission grid issues, especially in light of solar farms in new locations where “the transmission capability is not yet strong enough to host that new generation”.

“They’re running those lines very heavily I think and it was those lines being run very heavily that caused the sag in the lines – and then when you combine that with wind and the sag, that’s my understanding of what happened,” he said.

He said Australia suffered from a similar difficulty.

“It points to the real difficulty that we experienced in Australia and you see everywhere (that) transmission expansion, building out transmission, implies a large social cost on local communities in many cases … and that’s been an impediment to the expansion of transmission.”

Professor Mountain said the problem was not unique to solar power – or in fact any other kind of power generation be it coal-fired, nuclear, or wind – but it was more that the transmission infrastructure had not kept pace with the rate of change in new power generation locations.

Wind turbines in northern Spain, the day after a massive power cut. Picture: AFP

Grattan Institute energy director Tony Wood compared it to the South Australian blackout in 2016.

“No one was going to stop the storm, but when it knocked over the power lines in South Australia it then sent a big – a similar sort of thing by the sound of it – it sent big changes in voltage running through the system and the wind turbines had been set so that they could only deal with a certain number of those swings in frequency within a short space of time, and if the whole thing was so unstable for much longer than that, they shut down,” he said.

“So what happened was the wind turbines then shut down to protect themselves, which is what they’re designed to do, but that then cascaded right through the system and we had a statewide blackout in South Australia.”

He said it would be a “good idea” to examine whether Australia’s interstate power connections would have similar “sensitivity” issues with the rollout of renewable energy generation.