At 12:33 p.m. on April 28, something happened in Spain that you’ll likely hear about in Virginia this fall.
The electric grid across Spain — and then Portugal and a small part of France — suddenly shut down.
The details of what happened are not in dispute: Some strange oscillations in the power grid began at 12:03 p.m., went away, then came back, then went away again. At 12:32:57, to be precise, the power supply suddenly started dropping. Just 27 seconds later, at 12:33:24, the grid collapsed and two countries (and part of a third) were blacked out.
It took until 4 p.m. before power was restored.
For the three and a half hours in between, trains couldn’t run (35,000 passengers were stranded) and planes couldn’t fly (well, they could, but the airports couldn’t operate). Traffic signals ceased to work, forcing police officers to take to key intersections to direct traffic. Bank customers couldn’t access their financial information. Virtually every aspect of a modern, electric-powered society came to a halt. At least five people died, from mechanical ventilators that stopped working or from carbon monoxide from generators that the victims used indoors or, in one case, a fire started by a candle. The impacts of the blackout were felt as far away as Greenland, because the telecom services there rely on a cable that goes through Spain.
What is in dispute is why this blackout, typically described as “catastrophic,” happened. Officially, nobody knows why. Spanish authorities are still investigating. So is the organization that represents 40 different grid operators across Europe. That hasn’t stopped some people from declaring they know the reason anyway. Usually, they blame one thing: solar power.
At the time the Spanish grid blinked out, it was getting 59% of its power from the sun. If you add in 12% wind, Spain was getting 71% of its energy at the time from renewables. Those who don’t think much of renewables were quick to seize on this dependence on solar energy. “It’s very sad to see what’s happened to Portugal and Spain and so many people there, but you know, when you hitch your wagon to the weather, it’s just a risky endeavor,” said U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
There’s no evidence to support this — but also no evidence to deny it, either. The head of energy for the European Union said there was “nothing unusual” about the levels of renewable energy that Spain was relying on that day. Of course, there was also nothing unusual about the power supply that day — until there was none.
The reality is, we simply just don’t know what caused this blackout. We know it started at a single substation in Spain, but beyond that, we don’t know yet. Maybe it was a cyberattack. Maybe it was an old grid that needs to be modernized. Maybe it really was an overreliance on renewables — which do flow into a power grid differently than more conventional sources. That’s not fossil fuel propaganda. The senior climate and energy writer for the MIT Technology Review has written, “Did solar power cause Spain’s blackout?” and while she doesn’t have the answer, either, she does quote one tech expert that “wind and solar don’t contribute to grid stability in the same way that some other power sources do” — so it’s possible that a small problem with grid frequency caused by renewables could have cascaded into a bigger one. The Breakthrough Institute, a left-of-center environmental research group in California, published a cautionary report on the Spanish blackout: “That the Spanish grid collapsed under a bright sun just a half hour past midday fundamentally challenges platitudes that we have already solved the integration challenges of wind and solar power.”
The reason all this matters to us, half a world away, is that we are quite likely to hear about all this in the upcoming gubernatorial and House of Delegates elections in Virginia. That’s because energy is likely to figure in these elections in a way we haven’t seen since perhaps the days of “Howlin’ Henry” Howell railing against Virginia Electric Power in the late 1960s and early 1970s (as seen in this campaign ad from 1971).
Republicans signaled during this year’s General Assembly session that they intend to run against the Virginia Clean Economy Act, the 2020 law that mandates a carbon-free Virginia power grid by 2050. That unleashed a controversial wave of solar development across rural Virginia — controversial because some see solar as an ugly blight that turns their rural landscape into an unwanted industrial one. One Republican argument is the contention that the conversion to renewables is driving up power costs; Democrats counter that solar is actually cheaper than fossil fuels. Another Republican argument is that renewables are inherently unreliable — and that’s where the Spanish blackout provides a convenient and perhaps powerful example. It’s one thing to warn about the specter of blackouts; it’s quite another to point to one that’s already happened — even if nobody knows why it happened. Voters don’t have the patience to learn about the intricacies of “voltage control” or “synchronizing torque” or “ride-through capability,” all things that Power magazine discussed in its report on the blackout. The shorthand of “Spain relied on ‘the weather’ for power and got blacked out” is a lot easier to convey in a 30-second spot.
On the other hand, it’s possible that the Spanish and European reports — which might take weeks to complete — will come back and blame renewables (along with an old grid) to some degree for what happened. Again, we just don’t know.
However, we know that American reliance on solar energy is growing, although the percentages tend to be small. Virginia in April derived about 6% of its power from the sun, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s a bit higher than the national average of 3.9%. Virginia’s wind energy output is almost zero for now. However, Dominion Energy is developing the nation’s largest offshore wind project off the coast of Virginia Beach, and Apex Clean Energy of Charlottesville is building the state’s first onshore wind project in Botetourt County. (Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.) Nationally, wind is more important than solar — about 10% nationally— mostly because of some Midwestern states where wind is their primary power source. (Iowa gets 65.5% of its power from wind; Kansas 40%, Oklahoma 38%.)
Renewables are also where the growth is: In the first nine months of last year, 90% of the new power added to the U.S. grid nationally came from renewables, with 78% of that coming from solar, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Here’s a telling indication about the growth of renewables: On one sunny day in April, the PJM power grid, which includes the big coal-producing states of West Virginia and Pennsylvania (as well as Virginia), hummed with more power from renewables than from coal. Spring and fall often show high percentages of renewables because there’s not the peak demand of power that freezing winter nights or scorching summer days produce. Still, the point is the debate over power sources is not some academic one, which means the lessons from Spain — whatever they might be — will be important to us.
Here are four ways you may hear the Spanish blackout talked about in Virginia:
1. Expect to hear more about the need for ‘baseload’ power.
This refers to a minimum amount of power that can be counted on and that can supply power continuously. For some, this means natural gas, coal or nuclear (more on nuclear to come). Some renewable advocates, though, contend that the need for baseload power is a myth, that renewables can do just fine, especially when augmented with battery storage (more on that to come, too). Very few of us have the technical expertise to debate all this in a scientific fashion, although that won’t stop people on either side from debating it in political terms. In any case, keep in mind that Virginia will never be 100% reliant on renewables because we currently get about 28% of our power from nuclear energy — and might get more.
2. Expect to hear more about battery storage.
The downside of renewables is that they’re intermittent sources of power — the sun doesn’t shine at night, the wind doesn’t always blow. That can be mitigated by storing power. Critics say that’s not the same as being able to run a gas plant or a nuclear plant or even a coal plant 24/7. After all, even batteries run out at some point. However, the Spanish blackout has brought renewed attention to the importance of battery storage. We already have batteries deployed in Virginia — Martinsville uses one to buy and store power during low-demand times (when power is cheapest) and then put it into the local grid when demand is higher (and power is more expensive). As we develop more renewables, look for more talk about battery storage — they go hand-in-hand.
3. Expect to hear more about nuclear power.
Whether because of concerns about the reliability of renewables or a concern that renewables won’t be able to hit decarbonization goals soon enough, some on the left have now joined with some on the right to embrace nuclear power. It’s not clean energy — there is radioactive waste, which is stored on site — but it’s not carbon-based, either. Spain has been phasing out its nuclear plants, but now some in Europe are saying the continent needs more nuclear power, not less. “If you want a lot of power and you want it to be fossil-free, then nuclear is your pick,” the Swedish energy minister told Politico. “The whole of the EU should not make the Spanish mistake” of not having enough backup power available.
In the United States, nuclear is now seeing a renaissance after falling into disfavor after the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have pushed for more nuclear power. In Virginia, so have both candidates for governor — Democrat Abigail Spanberger and Republican Winsome Earle-Sears. The specific interest has been in a new type of small reactor known as small modular reactors. The only ones operable right now are in Russia and China, but the hope is that these reactors can be produced quickly and therefore relatively inexpensively, which would get around the traditional problem with nuclear power, which is that it’s slow and expensive to build. In Virginia, both Dominion and Appalachian Power are exploring these small reactors — Dominion at its existing North Anna nuclear site in Louisa County, Appalachian at its Joshua Falls substation in Campbell County.
4. Expect to hear more talk about ‘grid reliability.‘
Regardless of what’s to blame for the Spanish blackout, the fact is that many of Spain’s transmission lines are old — from the 1960s, in some cases. Transmission lines must be kept up-to-date, just like almost everything else. That hasn’t always happened. “While global investment in renewables has nearly doubled since 2010, investment in grids has barely changed at around $300 billion a year,” the Reuters news agency reports. “The amount needs to double by 2030 to over $600 billion a year to cover the necessary overhauls, according to the International Energy Agency.” Fortunately, Virginia is ahead of most states. The website Generator Source says Virginia ranks 13th for grid reliability (Utah ranks first; Louisiana last). Both Dominion Energy and Appalachia Power have embarked on “grid transformation” projects. However, that’s a bit more complicated than, say, repaving a highway. The more things we want to plug in, the more we need a grid that can handle all that power.
All this comes against a backdrop of growing power demands. The General Assembly’s research arm, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, produced a report in December that warned that if data center growth isn’t restrained, the demand for power in Virginia will triple. The PJM grid recently issued an advisory that, under its worst-case scenario, there won’t be enough power at certain times this summer.
Even without data centers, Virginia may need to produce more power anyway. We now import more power than any other state in the country — and that imported power tends to be more expensive than that we produce in-state. If we want cheaper power, we need cheaper sources. The problem with that is that nobody wants a power plant next to them. It’s a fine thing for politicians to say we need more power from this or more power from that, the trick is finding a place to do that. Solar has become controversial across Southside. We just saw 10 years of controversy over a natural gas pipeline. Some in Southwest Virginia objected to just the mention of a possible nuclear plant. The details of how we solve this conundrum will be both fascinating and perhaps messy. Politicians have some say in this, but not complete say. Market forces play some role, too. West Virginia legislators recently asked Appalachian executives whether having more data centers in the state would lead the utility to burn more coal. The answer was “no,” Appalachian would turn to natural gas because that’s cheaper.
So, when you hear candidates this fall debate energy, this is some of the background you’ll need to know — and that’s why what those reports into the Spanish blackout have to say might wind up being part of the Virginia campaigns.
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