“You should be anticipating every failure that can happen, and you should survive any one of them,” Cuffe says. From the control room, engineers should be able to tell what parts of the grid are definitely functioning so they won’t be flying blind—but it will still take time.
“Even with a completely healthy grid, to do that black start could take 12 hours or 16 hours. You have to do it sequentially, and it takes a long time. I’m sure there are engineers in vans swarming all over the place as we speak trying to make all this happen,” Cuffe says. “It’s like assembling some hellishly complicated Ikea furniture.”
The biggest issue is that without an established, obvious cause for the blackout in the first place, it will be difficult for engineers to know where to reestablish power first without triggering another outage.
“The challenge is to constantly match supply and demand,” says Ketan Joshi, an independent climate and energy consultant. “You need to perform that balancing act, not just plugging everything back in there.” Joshi describes it as a blackout “in reverse.”
“When a tree falls on a power line, you end up chopping off a small chunk of the grid. It’s a pain. A hundred homes get blacked out, a crew comes and they reenergize and reconnect the section that was disconnected,” Joshi explains. This is the same thing, but at an enormous scale. “When you have a blackout like the one we are seeing in Spain and in Portugal, the challenge to map supply and demand becomes ridiculously complicated. Every time you connect up a new chunk of households, you have to perform that same balancing act. The generators that are producing electricity have to match the new demand that has suddenly come on to the grid.”
REN (Red Eletrica Nacional), the main power operator in Portugal, gave a statement to the BBC saying that the outage was caused by “extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain. There were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration.’” Spain has yet to respond to this allegation.
“I scratched my head at that,” says Cuffe. Both of the country’s grids may be run by national operators, he explains, but they are shackled together as a synchronized grid, which means if one side fails the other one does too—making it not entirely unexpected for one to blame the other.
When it comes to propping the grid back up, both operators are on their own. The Iberian peninsula is an “energy island,” says Jan Rosenow, vice president of global strategy at the Regulatory Assistance Project, an NGO advancing policy innovation and thought leadership within the energy community. Spain and Portugal’s collective interconnection capacity with the rest of Europe—that is, how much of their energy they can draw from or send into the wider continent—is around 6 percent, far below the 2030 target of 15 percent set by the European Union.
