Analysis
In the climate transition, Spain is on a positive but fragile path
In Spain, the transition to renewables has not been accompanied by investments in power cables, and the stress the grid is under increases the likelihood of random or malicious collapses.
The first bulletin providing some official information came on Monday afternoon from the state-owned company that operates Portugal's electricity grid. It reported a “failure in the Spanish power grid” caused by a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” related to abnormal temperature variations in the inland regions.
In itself, a weather phenomenon is not enough to establish that climate change was responsible for the blackout that brought the Iberian Peninsula to a halt on Monday; furthermore, in the evening Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that this was still speculation and no scenario could be ruled out yet, including a hacker attack. Nonetheless, whether it was bad actors or bad weather, global warming and its geopolitical consequences are likely to have played a role.
Spain has embraced the green transition more vigorously than other countries in recent years. On April 16, the state-owned company Red Eléctrica de Espana announced a historic success: on that day, renewable energy was able to meet 100 percent of the nation's energy needs – an unprecedented milestone.
This is mostly thanks to wind power and solar installations, which in recent years have turned Spain into a European clean energy superpower, second only to Germany. Thanks to sun and wind, Spain has also been able to remain immune from the consequences of the abrupt interruption of Russian hydrocarbon supplies that followed the invasion of Ukraine.
However, this excellent result does have a downside. Wind and solar plants must be built in areas that offer the best environmental conditions, which don’t necessarily match up with those that need the most amount of energy. Today, 42 percent of Spain’s electricity is produced in four regions that consume just 12 percent. In contrast, the Madrid metropolitan area produces only 4 percent of the energy it consumes. Because of this asymmetry, power must be transported over longer distances.
“This concentration of supply, together with the new technical challenges posed by renewables, requires improvements to the electricity grid to ensure efficient transport of the electricity generated,” explained a report by the research center of the Banco de Bilbao, published in March and which now seems prophetic. “No such improvements have been seen, at least with regard to the extension of the high-voltage grid.” In other words, the transition to renewables has not been accompanied by investments in power cables, and the stress the grid is under increases the likelihood of random or malicious collapses.
But the internal connections of Spain’s power grid are only part of the explanation. The Iberian Peninsula remains in a historical condition of isolation from the rest of the continent from an energy perspective. The only connections to the European grid are through a few cables that cross the Pyrenees. In all, they can carry just 2.8 gigawatts of power, or 2 percent of all generated power. This is a low number, considering that Europe has set an energy interconnection target for all member countries of 10 percent by 2025 and 15 percent by 2030 to ensure continent-wide security of the energy supply.
With such a bottleneck, the line bringing power from France is congested 67.6 percent of the time, according to Red Eléctrica reports. And the potential 600 megawatts coming in from Morocco is a negligible addition. Thus, in case of systemic failures, bringing power from across the border becomes impossible. This is a known problem that the Spanish government was already attempting to remedy before the disaster: for the four-year period 2022-2026, Madrid has allocated nearly €7 billion to strengthen the electricity grid.
The blackout can thus be explained by the disorganized nature of Spain's green transition path, which built clean power generation plants before the energy transport infrastructure required. It is a bump in the road along a virtuous path, which must not be interrupted, whether by a weather phenomenon or a cyberattack.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/transizione-climatica-un-cammino-virtuoso-ma-ancora-fragile on 2025-04-29