Rethinking power resilience after the Iberian blackout

Pamela Largue (0:12)

As more variable renewable energy is integrated into our transforming power system, one question continues to spark debate. Are renewables making our grids less reliable? To answer this question, I speak to Adrian Guggisberg, Division President, Electrical Distribution Solutions at ABB. He references the Iberian blackout, highlighting key lessons about maximizing grid resilience, and emphasizes the consequences of increasingly complex power systems operating on infrastructure designed for a different era. From artificial intelligence and smarter distribution networks, Adrian explains why the energy transition demands a rethink of how grids are designed, monitored and controlled. This episode is brought to you in partnership with electrification and automation specialists, ABB. I am Pamela Largue, and this is the Energy Transitions Podcast.

Adrian, thank you so much for joining me today. We're talking about such an important topic of increasing renewable energy and the impact that is having on the grid. So let's dive in.

Is the increased share of renewable energies causing grid issues? Are we seeing that renewables are actually responsible for blackouts?

Adrian Guggisberg (1:30)

Hey Pam, thanks a lot for having me first of all.

It's a super valid question. I think that people are getting maybe in some places of the world a bit worried about what it means to add so much renewable power into the power grid. Look, probably it would be either way would be the wrong answer to say no and it would also be the wrong answer to say yes, it is causing a blackout.

What is a fact, maybe to make a bit of an analogy, it's like if you would have a car from the 1970s, you would say, okay, let me put now the latest motor, which I can find on the market into that same car and let me drive as fast as I can. I think that would not work well. Now, is the motor guilt for the car would have not a good performance? Probably not. I think that the car as a design needs to fit together with the motor. So a little bit the similar thing is our grids were built years ago, designed with having power generation, large power generation, centralized, well controlled. And now suddenly we have a complete different scheme when there is a lot of renewable power, it's very distributed, it behaves differently than the power generation would have behaved, which originally the grid was designed for. And the combination can cause now new challenges.

Pamela Largue (2:46)

New challenges indeed, but what a great analogy. And just for breaking that down for us, Adrian, I'd like to hone in specifically on the Iberian blackout, which surprised many because it wasn't actually caused by an equipment failure.

So what was the role then of renewable energy in this? What else actually caused the blackout if it wasn't renewables?

Adrian Guggisberg (3:09)

Yeah, I think probably many people have watched now very carefully the analysis of what happened there. And I think there was a report published a few weeks ago on the detailed analysis. Obviously, there's kind of a very complex scheme, and it's not super simple and there are many elements. But let me try to summarize a bit of the main learnings, at least the way I would look at this, what we saw from the report and from those learnings. The first point was actually, there was really a lot of renewable power was in the grid, which kind of supplied the energy into the grid. That was one element. The other element was the renewable power where it was generated was not necessarily where the power was consumed. So it was transferred over quite some distances in the Iberian islands. And that kind of was, let me say, the starting point. Now what happened is at the one operation point, the grid started to oscillate. Probably oscillation you all understand from the music when there is a sound where tone goes up and down and so on.

So the energy started to oscillate. Now that's a very dangerous situation for a grid. In that respect, it's not something which people would be overly concerned, but one needs to act. And the grid operator acted. They reconfigured the grid. By reconfiguring the grid, you're changing the behavior of the grid. That oscillation went away. But by the reconfiguration of the grid, actually something else was caused and there was another oscillation. Actually a known oscillation was triggered, which is actually in between the continent. It's called the West-East oscillation or mode.

And for that, there are kind of predefined procedures on how to act when this happens. So the procedure was again to do some reconfiguration of the grid, now to deal specifically with that problem.