From the electric blackout of April 28, the authorities have activated several analysis committees to clarify the exact causes of the incident. Although there is still no defined cause, specialized working groups have already been created and open commissions with Portugal and France to coordinate answers to this phenomenon that crossed borders. In spite of all this deployment, only preliminary hypotheses and new clues are handled that, far from simplifying the stage, makes it more complex.
A new track. The Ministry for Ecological Transition (MITECO) convened a third meeting that in the investigation phase was discovered a “third event” that may be related to the trigger of the crisis, according to EuropePress. This disturbance occurred exactly 19 seconds before the main incident registered at 12:33 p.m. on Monday, April 28.
Technical chain The information available so far points to a technical and operational network much more than what was thought at first, as EuropePress has reported. It would not be simply a punctual error, but of a conjunction of events, possibly interdependent, which affected the stability of the system. In fact, this week, the cybersecurity group teams are visiting operation centers, such as Red Electrica, to collect key information on-site.
They already warned. There is a question that does not stop around the debates about whether the electrical system is ready to adapt to a new model based on renewable energy. According to the economist, Red Electrica had requested from the government a period of five years to adapt its security measures to the new reality of the electrical system, more decentralized and with a growing weight of renewable energy.
This does not imply a direct responsibility in what happened, but it does indicate an ongoing transition that requires resources, time and planning. The management of a network with more renewable weight involves new technical challenges, which the system is still learning to handle.
Under the same focus. In the midst of this analysis process, the Executive has decided to exclude large electricity, such as Iberdrola, Endesa and EDP of the commission that investigates the blackout, as detailed by the newspaper. The decision has generated tensions, since some voices consider that precipitated or guilty decisions are being made without conclusive evidence. For its part, the Government has argued that exclusion responds to the objective of guaranteeing an independent analysis, although this decision has fueled criticism.
The truth is that the public image of the blackout has harmed all the actors involved: operators, electric and the government itself. The lack of a clear and univocal cause makes this case an uncomfortable puzzle for all parties. In this sense, as one of those responsible for the analysis has signed internally, “the photo of the blackout harms everyone.”
It will take time to resolve. Similar cases in other countries show that clarifying these types of incidents have been. In the United States, for example, the mass blackout of Texas in 2021 took several months to be analyzed in depth, with technical reports, legislative appearances and cross data on weather, generation and demand. In Italy, the great blackout of 2003 also needed research weeks to determine the exact sequence of failures. It is a complex type of analysis, where each technical data has operational, political and regulatory implications.
Follow the investigation. As the meetings progress – the planned with Ree today – the technical teams are expected to establish a more precise sequence than what happened. At the moment, the only clear thing is that we are facing an unpublished situation, unprecedented recently in the Iberian electrical system.
Instead of looking for a single responsible, the focus must now be to thoroughly understand the technical, structural and operational causes of the blackout. Only in this way can something similar happen again.
Image | Seoane Prado
WorldOfSoftware | The blackout left all Spain without capacity to communicate. The problem is that it also isolated the government
