Spain suffered several power glitches and industry officials sounded repeated warnings about the instability of its power grid in the build up to its catastrophic blackout on Monday.
The government has ordered several investigations into the blackout. Industry experts say that whatever the cause, the mass outage and earlier smaller incidents indicate the Spanish power grid faces challenges amid the boom of renewables.
A surplus of energy supply can disrupt power grids in the same way as a deficit, and grid operators must maintain balance.
You listed storage and sources of energy. I’m not saying there can’t be improvements there, but the Grid is the transmission network used to carry the electricity.
More power lines, more/better interconnections with other countries (France). Better load management. That sort of thing.
Yes, I only listed means to store or produce energy because upgrading powerlines won’t fix power fluctuations : that is due to imbalances between production and consumption, no amount of upgraded to transmission capacity is likely to help.
Load management might help, however. But it’s typically hard to get people to consume more when needed and power shedding is expensive on the electrical operator… Especially since those oscillations were unexpected. Also those things already exist in many European countries.
It can certainly help
Those imbalances are usually localised (and so are power cuts, usually). Having multiple paths for power to get from generation to load will increase stability.
Better connections between Spain and France is certain to help. But EDF don’t want cheap Iberian electricity flooding their export markets.