Investment needed in under-pressure energy infrastructure to prevent blackouts

A bus drives in downtown Madrid during a major power outage on April 28; the Iberian blackout during the spring was a timely reminder of how much we rely on a solid energy system and the devastating effects when things can go wrong. File picture: Manu Fernandez/ AP
Trains grinding to a halt, retailers unable to handle card payments and businesses forced to shut down en masse — the Iberian blackout during the spring was a timely reminder of how much we rely on a solid energy system and the devastating effects when things can go wrong.
As experts continue to sift through the fallout of Europe’s most significant blackout in more than two decades, at home, Irish experts say it shows how important it is to invest in our under-pressure energy grid to make it more resilient and to ensure it can handle it if and when things go wrong.
“What happened in Spain was a technical failure and an engineering issue,” said University College Cork senior lecturer in power systems engineering Dr Barry Hayes.
“It was a set of very particular factors they hadn’t seen before, and maybe weren’t fully prepared for.
“We’re spoilt in a way, we’re not used to power outages occurring very often. We rarely think about what goes into keeping the lights on.”
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In April, the large-scale outage paralysed cities and towns across Portugal and Spain.
The power failure that lasted more than eight hours saw some people trapped in lifts, while others had to trudge down multiple flights of stairs in the darkness with only their mobile phones for light.
Metros and trains ground to a halt, leaving people either sealed in carriages by electric doors for hours, or forced to jump down, pick their way over tracks, and walk to nearby towns.
Initially, questions were asked to whether a cyber attack could be behind the blackout but authorities had ruled that out.
In a report from the European network of electricity transmission system operators — of which Ireland’s Eirgrid is a member — earlier this month, a cyber attack was again ruled out.
While it pointed to what contributed to the blackout, such as oscillations on the grid and the actions taken to try mitigate them, the exact root causes have yet to be determined.
“It took 20 seconds to go from slightly elevated but stable voltage levels to dangerously high,” Dr Hayes said.
“And then it all collapsed. That’s how quick it was. And it could happen even faster.”
Marcos Byrne, policy manager at Wind Energy Ireland, said a “series of unfortunate events” triggered the blackout and highlighted that Ireland is similarly vulnerable in that is relatively isolated from mainland Europe, with its renewable sources coming from solar and wind.
“We’ve both been really strong on renewables,” Mr Byrne said. “We can accept up to 75% renewables on the grid at any one time.”
“It’s how we’ve done everything else. Building renewables is one thing, but to continue you need to be building supporting infrastructure alongside it.”
He said that such supporting technology can help when there is instability on the grid, and make it more resilient such as developing more energy storage and flexibility to respond to unforeseen events.
“But there’s absolutely learnings from what happened in the Iberian case,” he said. “From the get-go, we may be on the right path, but we’re not there yet.
“The next five years are very critical for our energy system,” he said.
“A lot of our infrastructure is decades old and we need to modernise how we operate the grid. We need to learn very quickly from recent storms too.”
Dr Hayes said we have suffered from “massive underinvestment” in the grid in the past, but that is “starting to turn around”.
“We have been running the grid close to its limits over recent years,” he said. “Margins at the moment are tighter than they have been in the past.
“We’ve been very tight before in a recent winter where if anything else had gone wrong we’d have been in serious trouble.
"We’ve been very tight before when two interconnectors tripped but we survived that. It shows there’s a resilience there.”
The importance for Ireland to avoid such an event can’t be overstated.
In the wake of the Spanish incident, its main business lobby claimed the costs could exceed a billion euro from a blackout that lasted less than a day.
In the budget last week, ministers said €3.5bn would be invested in our national grid infrastructure, with energy minister Darragh O’Brien saying it would help "future proof" our energy system for “the ongoing transition to indigenous renewables, and the impacts of a changing climate, as we have seen during recent storms”.
Conor Healy, chief executive of Cork Chamber, said reinforcing and enhancing Ireland’s electricity grid must be a “national priority” for our energy security, renewables goals and for our economic competitiveness.
“The current grid lacks the capacity to integrate large volumes of new renewable generation or to meet rapidly increasing demand from housing, transport, and industry,” Mr Healy said.
“Cork is earmarked for substantial population growth in the coming decades, and it is vital that we see significant investment in our grid to ensure the region has the capacity to support existing and future residential and commercial needs.”
He added that Cork was uniquely placed to help drive the transformation as it will be home to the major energy project linking Ireland’s with France, the Celtic Interconnector, currently under construction.
Looking ahead, Dr Hayes said that while there are lessons that operators across Europe will learn from the Iberian event, it was very specific circumstances that caused it.
“The thing is with every blackout that occurs is that it’s different,” he said.
“If it was something a grid operator could’ve anticipated beforehand, it wouldn’t have happened.
“It’s hard to draw a direct line between a specific set of circumstances with different demands.”
But, he added, on the grid there were more concerted efforts underway to ensure it can meet the demands Ireland needs of it going forward.

In a statement, Eirgrid said that the expert European panel was still working to determine the root causes of the Iberian blackout and establish recommendations to help prevent similar incidents in the future.
“The recommendations from this final report may be of relevance to the operation of Ireland’s power system, and may in turn serve to enhance our comprehensive suite of measures deployed on an ongoing basis that are designed to safeguard the resilience of the Irish electricity grid,” Eirgrid said.
“We work closely with Government, the CRU (Commission for Regulation of Utilities), and other energy sector agencies to ensure national preparedness for the unlikely occurrence of power system emergencies of this nature — including undertaking regular training, blackstart tests, and multi-stakeholder exercises.”
- Additional reporting from Reuters
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