The annual report of the Chilean National Electric Coordinator included 10 minutes of analysis of February’s apagón, which concluded with this bland (translated and misquote-corrected) statement by then-coordinator, Ernesto Huber:
"everything indicates that in the not-too-distant future, generation will be 100% renewable, and to achieve this state, we must be certain that situations like this will not be repeated in the future, since it ultimately puts the security and reliability of the system at risk.
But worldwide experience, notably during Spain’s recent blackout indicates that 100% renewables is an unrealistic goal. The system inertia that stabilizes a national power grid requires a certain amount of conventional, ie turbine-based generation. The current rule-of-thumb indicates a 50-50 conventional Vs renewables mix is required to maintain the all-important frequency stability of the power generation network.
For those interested, this article exhaustively analyses the probable cause of the Spanish Apagón with conclusions that should be applied to the Chilean situation, and which contradict Ernesto Huber’s optimistic, and imho unrealistic statement:
“While we may not know the true cause of the Iberian blackout for some time, we have a reasonable idea about why it was so widespread. Full system-wide outages are rare, as are the black starts that follow, but with the growing reliance on inverter-based renewables, electricity grids are becoming less stable. No doubt system operators around the world will be reviewing their approach to maintaining inertia in the aftermath of this incident.”
That’s just an excuse by the politicians to cover up two design flaws in the electrical grid: the first was the introduction of too many solar and wind power plants, which make recovery after any failure much more difficult (they are not synchronous); and the second was the full interconnection of the northern, central, and southern distribution systems without leaving the necessary isolations and protective measures, which causes cascading failures. Something similar happened in Spain— the Spanish government gave similar excuses, but over there, the engineers immediately pointed out the real causes, which were these serious design flaws made by the politicians.
Yeah, the intromisión of politicians into areas that really should be managed by professionals, in this case Electrical Engineers is a worldwide problem.
The National Electric System (SEN) faced “an emergency condition” and the risk of “power rationing,” warned Enel Generación and Acciona Energía, following a failure on the same transmission line that caused the outage that left customers from Arica to Puerto Montt in the dark last February. Adding to the new failure is the shortage of natural gas for electricity generation.
Problems are never fixed properly here, they always keep coming back. And what’s with this “gas shortage”? The Iran situation is only a week old, and surely they built up a stockpile for the winter months. Or maybe they didn’t. Or couldn’t due to lack of storage facilities.
Chile closed down its coal-fired power stations and the Isla Riesco coal mine for the fashionable “environmental” reasons so eagerly copycatted here. Maybe that was a mistake.
An authoritative comment on the UK situation with local relevance:
Security of supply is a concept not fully understood by accountants, civil servants and certainly politicians. An obvious example is with the premature decommissioning of coal resource that enables a year of coal storage at site. This failure of policy led to a hike in consumer bills that was forced by gas turbines becoming the only source of dispatchable generation available. This was compounded by the failure of policy to develop gas storage, intended but never realised, unlike France and Germany who both have considerable storage capacity available.
The Spain power cut can not be blamed on renewables. There was a complex serious of causes if you look at the official report and sensible analysis.
There’s no evidence that renewables cause more power cuts.
There are plenty of countries with more renewables than Spain that haven’t had power cuts.
South Africa’s grid is full of coal and it has hundreds of times more power cuts than Spain, but that doesn’t mean a grid can’t be effectively run on coal.
And the potential Chilean gas shortage was due to the unusually cold snap in Argentina which raised domestic consumption to record levels. Faced with possible shortages, Argentina restricted gas exports to Chile, although the situation is now normalizing.
Well, that report concludes that the failure was caused by operational and engineering deficiencies in the photovoltaic generation sector.
I read the whole thing, and posted a resumé here.
Since this report was produced by the entity responsible for the outage, it will be interesting to see what the independent european investigation comes up with.
One thing that is definitely apparent is the mismatch in action and reaction times between the various components of the power grid, including the human element, which makes for an inherently unstable system.
Much has also been written about the apagón not long ago which affected not just Spain but parts of France and Portugal as well. Of course it became an immediate political hot potato, with “renewables” being blamed for the fundamental cause of the failures, to equally acrid denials by the Greenies of such culpability.
Now it looks like in fact the renewables side was a factor, if not the primary cause, in the most massive apagón in Spanish history.
IEEE is typically quite even-handed in such matters. Even without reading between the lines, the nature (or limitations) of solar power can be seen as a contributing factor within the context and environment of current practices. And the key word is … inertia.
IEEE article, 16 June 2025:
“In the first days after the blackout, many outlets and experts focused on the frequency of the grid and the need for inertia, which refers to how spinning generators carry physical momentum that makes them slow to change the frequency of the alternating current (AC) they generate. Most equipment on an electrical grid must operate within a fairly narrow range of a set frequency. Conventional power plants, such as combined-cycle natural gas or hydroelectric plants, can provide inertia, but newer sources such as photovoltaic solar power do not, unless they use so-called grid-forming technology. So the inertia discourse was in part a discussion of how to incorporate direct current sources such as photovoltaics into an AC grid…”
We can only wonder if anyone in Chile is paying sufficient attention to what was to be learned from el apagón español.
Kathryn Porter, an industry professional, has produced a detailed analysis of the sequence of events that led to that blackout based on the red eléctrica report, (english version here) and concludes:
A rush to net zero and a complacent attitude tovoltage control andcode compliance led Spain’s grid to collapse
The key messages we should take away from the Iberian blackout are:
Poorly configured inverters can cause catastrophic failures in weak grids
More attention needs to be paid to voltage control and not just managing frequency
There needs to be better monitoring of grid code compliance
The normalisation of deviance often leads to disaster
Fundamentally, TSOs, regulators and energy ministries need to ensure they are not so blinded by their net zero goals that they compromise grid stability, particularly by allowing a gradual erosion of standards that eventually exceeds what grids can cope with. Eleven people lost their lives in the Iberian blackout, so it is vital that the right lessons are learned to avoid any repeat either in Spain or elsewhere.
As a commentator said, a system operating “within limits” is not necessarily a system fully under control.
Grid topology here is quite simple compared to the Spanish model, so in theory there should be less likelihood of the same type of events occurring, but given the overly-politicized, and technically superficial energy policies in place here, I think its only a matter of time before our next apagón, which bring us back to the doubts cast at the very start of this topic.
For those few still interested, Kathryn Porter, the lady mentioned in my previous post has produced a video that looks at the causes of the recent Iberian blackout.
