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ENERGY

Spain and Portugal present their ‘energy island’ plan for cutting electricity costs

Spain and Portugal on Thursday sent Brussels their joint proposal for lowering electricity prices in the Iberian peninsula to a maximum of €30 ($33) per megawatt hour, Spain’s ecology minister said.

Published: 1 April 2022 11:39 CEST
Spain and Portugal present their 'energy island' plan for cutting electricity costs
Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez (L) and Portugal's Prime Minister Antonio Costa speak ahead of a meeting as part of a European Union (EU) summit at EU Headquarters in Brussels on March 25th, 2022. (Photo by JOHN THYS / AFP)

The move came a week after the European Union agreed that Spain and Portugal could deviate from the bloc’s rules on energy pricing to ease the impact of energy prices on consumers.

Spain and Portugal are in a strategically advantageous position in that they’re not as dependent on Russian natural gas as many of their European neighbours, importing most of it from Algeria and other countries.

Spain is also the country with the largest gas storage and regasification capacity in Europe and together with Portugal is a renewable energy leader in terms of solar, hydraulic and wind power. Their energy markets are more self-sufficient and extremely well connected between both nations.

This has led the two countries that form the Iberian peninsula (as well as tiny Andorra) to be referred to as an “energy island” by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his Portuguese counterpart António Costa, as a simplified way of describing why their countries should be temporarily released from the EU’s common market rules.

The decision to grant Spain and Portugal “special treatment” came after their efforts to convince Brussels to decouple electricity prices from the gas market fell on deaf ears.

“We have a joint proposal… and we’re working with the European Commission” to push it through, Teresa Ribera told reporters.

The proposal involves capping the price of gas used for the generation of electricity to the equivalent of “€30 ($33)” per megawatt hour, she said.

Such a cap, which would significantly reduce the price of electricity on the wholesale market in both countries, “is one of the technical elements of the proposal we need to discuss with Brussels”, she said.

Prices are particularly high in the Iberian peninsula, with both Spain and Portugal heavily dependent on gas to produce electricity.

Prices have risen sharply in both countries in recent months due to the rules governing Europe’s electricity market which obliges producers to sell electricity on the wholesale markets at a price determined by the most expensive production costs — that of gas-fired power plants.

READ ALSO: Is Spain ready to be the EU’s main natural gas supplier?

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ELECTRICITY

How would Spain react if there was a major blackout?

Doomsday series and fake news have made the prospect of a national and Europe-wide outage seem outlandish, and yet we come close to such a critical event. How would Spanish authorities react if there was a days-long power cut?

Published: 28 June 2024 12:48 CEST
How would Spain react if there was a major blackout?

In January, 2021, a technical fault at an electricity plant in Croatia almost knocked out Europe’s entire power grid.

In 2003, 56 million people were left without electricity for several hours in Italy and Switzerland, but there have been outages that have affected far more people and lasted longer, such as the 2012 India blackouts that cut off the supply of electricity for two days to 620 million people. 

Even the entire island of Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands has been hit by two major outages in recent years.

Sri Lanka, Turkey, Zanzibar, Brazil, Pakistan, Venezuela – there are countless other blackouts over the past two decades caused by software errors, network overloads, accidents and adverse weather conditions. 

Most feared of all is the prospect of a solar storm so powerful that the grid couldn’t be restored within a matter of hours, days or weeks. 

Such an apocalyptic scenario was depicted in the 2022 Movistar+ series Apagón (Blackout in English), which follows several people in Spain as they survive in a world without electricity.

The prospect of a solar storm setting us back two centuries seems far-fetched and has been exploited and overblown by fake news sources.

A geomagnetic storm caused by a solar storm did cause a nine-hour outage in Quebec in 1989, meaning that it isn’t impossible but by no means as permanent a blackout as some doomsdayers fear. 

However, as the Covid-19 pandemic taught us, even the most unfathomable can sometimes become reality.

So what if this scenario were to hit Spain or the world as a whole?

Spain’s Environment Teresa Ribera flatly ruled out that this could affect Spain and defended that “we can rule it out from our future concerns” despite the fact that Europe’s electricity grid is linked from London all the way to Istanbul.

According to Ribera, the Spanish energy system “is almost an energy island and as we have almost double the installed power than what we use, the risk of a type of blackout due to a system failure in third countries is very limited”.

Madrid authorities are not so convinced by the national government’s stance, and in 2021 called for a nationwide action plan ready to be executed jointly across the regions in the event of a major blackout. 

In 2017, the Spanish Association of Civil Protection for Spatial Weather filed in the Spanish Congress a request to develop a national ‘anti-solar blackout’ plan but this somewhat bizarrely got passed on to the agricultural department and forgotten about. 

They ended up drawing up their own report studying what could be done in all manner of scenarios: accidents at power generation plants, scarcity of essential supplies (food, water, fuel and electricity), and meteorological events. 

After the freak snow storm that brought the Spanish capital to a standstill for several days that very year, it comes as no surprise that Madrid authorities want to be prepared in future.

Protocol measures went from establishing shelters, to a hierarchy of importance in terms of essential services and infrastructure, from the fire service to hospitals.

Specific recommendations for citizens included stocking up on electric generators, batteries, candles, analogue radio receivers and basic foods that do not require cold storage.

But the truth remains that there is no handbook available for Spain’s national government to execute in the event of a major blackout. 

What it has established recently is its SMS alert system, whereby everyone on the country’s phone network receives a message warning them of imminent dangers or risks. 

At this point in time, Spanish authorities simply don’t consider the risk of a major blackout to be worrisome enough to require a detailed action plan. 

The impossibility of Spain being completely off the grid is shared by those in charge of it – Red Eléctrica de España (REE) – but a Europe-wide blackout would undeniably still bring problems to most of the 48 million people living in this country.

READ ALSO: What are the chances of a big earthquake happening in Spain?

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