Disclaimer: I can't really vouch for any of this, but let me tell you what's being discussed in the press over here.
This is Government's version and it shows.
REE boss was put there by the ruling party. Still they try to paint REE as a private operator now. It's not. Like many other orgs, it's a mix of private and public capital, ultimately controled by the government.
It's suspected that the blackout was caused because she overruled technicians' opinion, looking for a solar % record.
Not "enough thermal power stations" carefully avoids mentioning nuclear, that they want to erradicate.
Private companies are requesting the records of CECOEL conversation to be published, some have leaked their logs. In one of those, REE technicians readily admit that oscilations are caused by not enough nuclear in the mix.
Yeah, these public / private entities can get ridiculous. Her background is legal and political: Secretary of Women and Equality, Spokesperson for Housing, Minister of Housing, State Secretary of Housing and Urban Construction, etc. But she's a party loyalist and she took a few business classes, so it's all good.
I mean it could be good enough, as long as she listens to the experts and doesn’t think that “these nerds are preventing me from making history and breaking records” (assuming what parent comment says is true).
Sure, but even better would be if she had experience in the industry to judge tactical advice she is given and set strategic direction. Otherwise the best she can do is "not get in the way".
> Otherwise the best she can do is "not get in the way".
Playing devil's advocate, policy can be set by inertia (i.e., no one is fired for buying IBM). So a government loyalist can have the motivation to implement a policy change that breaks away from conservative biases towards how a problem is solved. You already see how the criticism is that things weren't done as they were always done, aka "Don't touch it to not break it". The problem with this approach is that conservative approaches are not inherently safer: their primary value is to serve as scapegoat and create responsibility voids. See for example how some critics attack how nuclear was not singled out as baseline, when under this scenario nuclear would be by design the first system being pulled from the network.
Spain is being criticized for implementing a policy to shift the country's energy supply away from fossil+nuclear and towards renewables. Naturally there will be growing pains. Attacking the regulator based on shifts in policy only underline that the attacks are political, thus complaining that the top stop was handed to a politician actually justifies the move as clearly the position is responsible for managing the political side of the policy shift.
It’s incredible that here of all places you will have someone justify a person who’s completely unqualified running something as important as a country’s electrical network.
I wonder if they’d say the same if this had happened in, say, Hungary.
But then you get complaints/problems of revolving doors and how's she supposed to reform an industry that she will have to go back working for again after her tenure as minister or secretary - assuming she wants to eat and feed her family using her hard-earned industry experience.
Doesn't have to be nuclear, can be anything that provides reactive power and grid services, i.e. grid forming battery storage. The problem is this service is needed on the Spanish grid, but isn't paid for in the market. Pay for it and the grid services will be provided. Resources below. Mind you, doesn't have to be a Tesla battery, just has to be a battery with power controls (grid forming) and some lithium cells for fast response (vs sodium for longer duration discharge).
China launches world’s first grid-forming sodium-ion battery storage plant - https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/03/china-launches-worlds-fi... - June 3rd, 2025 ("With a total investment of over CNY 460 million [$63.8 million] and occupying 34k square metres, the Baochi plant is designed for an installed capacity of 200MW/400MWh. Based on a dual daily charge-discharge cycle, it can regulate up to 580 GWh annually — enough to power 270,000 households, with 98 per cent of its energy sourced from renewables. The facility supports more than 30 local wind and solar power stations, alleviating the impact of intermittent supply and facilitating the integration of high shares of renewables into the grid.")
Grid forming services are indeed paid for, according to this very same article:
> Power plants "should have controlled voltage and, moreover, many of them were economically remunerated to do so. They did not absorb all the reactive power that was expected," Aagesen said.
It is possible I misread or misunderstood something on the topic with regards to compensation for grid services in the article. With that said, before jumping to solutioning (although I am a strong proponent of batteries based on their performance, capabilities, and cost as of this comment), I would like to see more information and data as to which generators were signaled to change their output when the grid started to fault and were unable or unwilling to (failure to appropriately manage output and/or field excitation to absorb reactive power, etc) and if improvements to the electricity market are required. Without root cause, we cannot effectively solve.
> The Iberian grid is capable of handling this sort of thing. But the grid operator only scheduled 10 power plants to handle voltage regulation on the 28th, which the report notes is the lowest total it had committed to in all of 2025 up to that point. The report found that a number of those plants failed to respond properly to the grid operators, and a few even responded in a way that contributed to the surging voltages.
> As the voltages rose, they approached a threshold at which power plants need to disconnect from the grid to protect their equipment. But the report found that some of the plants disconnected before the threshold was reached. And with each disconnection, the voltages on the grid continued to rise, causing plants to disconnect in multiple Spanish provinces. At that point, things spun out of control, with the grid frequency dropping. That led to it falling out of sync with its connection to France, causing the shutdown. The blackout had long since passed the point of intervention.
> It may be tempting to view the cascading failures as a sign of incompetence on the part of the grid operators. But these are the same operators who managed to restore the process of black-starting the grid to normal operations within a matter of hours. There should (and undoubtedly will) be questions about the low number of plants dedicated to grid stabilization, but that can be handled with a simple policy fix. An equally focused correction can likely address any problems at the problematic facility that triggered the whole chain of events.
> The real issue is why so much hardware on the grid didn't follow its operating specifications, either disconnecting early or failing to respond properly to the calls for stabilization.
> REE technicians readily admit that oscilations are caused by not enough nuclear in the mix
Any argument using the words "nuclear" or "inertia" are incorrect (I suspect often downstream of misdirection caused by the incumbents).
A power network is supposed to be reliable, and it is up to the regulator to create the internal incentives and restrictions such that the network remains reliable as new generation is added.
Other countries have successfully designed their electricity market incentives so that solar provides synthetic inertia, and manages reactive power, and so that voltage cutoffs (over or under) don't destabilise the grid.
The regulator failed to design a stable network. If they were told to run it in an unstable manner, it is up to them to cover their arse.
> Private companies are requesting the records of CECOEL conversation to be published, some have leaked their logs. In one of those, REE technicians readily admit that oscilations are caused by not enough nuclear in the mix.
And where are those leaks, if one may ask?
French-side the only generation station that actually was ejected from the network that day was, precisely, a nuclear power plant. [1] A non-specific "moar nuclear!" cry seems therefore a bit hard to believe.
This doesn't make the point you think it makes. Nuclear power plants are supposed to go offline in unstable grid conditions. This ensures they don't overheat, equipment isn't damaged, and that they can be taken offline in a safe, rather than unsafe manner.
Your point is not really a point either: every power plant can be ejected from the network in such cases, and not just nuclear ones. The remark here is that it precisely happened to a nuclear first.
Nuclear can't ramp up or down fast. As the grid loses generation capacity the load on the base-load type capacity becomes too variable and that capacity has to be brought offline. It's that simple. Nuclear wasn't ejected because there was too much of it but because there was not enough capacity of all types, especially of the gas-fired type that can most readily respond to solar and wind drop-off.
My point is "moar nuclear" guarantees nothing as evidenced by what happened _in France_ (hint: not exactly the same as in Spain even if same underlying direct cause). Your remark, at best, only adds to my point, and is not a counterargument to mine. And for the record, very few power stations can ramp up "fast" or "down" for the level required here -- this is not something that uniquely applies to nuclear. Even oft-quoted gas stations still measure "ramp up" in hours.
This doesn't show what you think it does. It shows that there was not enough gas-fired (and battery) capacity to offset solar and wind drop-off. Nuclear was driven off because nuclear is strictly base-load only and cannot ramp up fast enough to cope with the variability of peak-load -- under those circumstances nuclear _must_ disconnect from the grid (or part of the grid must be isolated from the rest).
I would think that a trivial solution for that is to create devices that can supply variable demand. (For example by heating up water somewhere in the ocean.) If the power created by nuclear exceeds base-line demand, create artificial demand to level out the valleys. By strategically wasting power, nuclear can supply a larger share of the demand.
I know it's a shamed topic around here, or it seems like it, however I find the Bitcoin mining aspect of chewing up these "needed to be wasted" loads the one true positive of it (Bitcoin).
Yeah, it's changed from its seeming origins. Yes it's number go up! But being able to turn that extra juice, that NEEDS to go somewhere back into 'cash' is certainly on my list of positives.
Obviously, it's lower than batteries and lower or on par with storing as sand/thermal (I guess location and season dependant on this one).
One other perk, now that I rant about thermal, is being able to absorb this extra energy, do some calculations and then provide (location/season) heat. Seems like the calculation aspect is the 3 birds one stone, to me.
Nuclear isn't the only issue. It's the lack of sufficient online gas-fired and hydro and battery peak-load capacity. There might not have been enough base-load capacity either, in which case all the peak-load capacity being online would not be enough -- in this case then yes, more nuclear (and coal) would have helped.
Yeah, this is a miscalculation, a miscalculation of the -you know- _political_ sort. It's not some junior employee's math error. It was _policy_. It blew up in the policy maker's face.
For me the keywords are "capacidad de control de tensión insuficiente" (insufficient voltage control capacity) which was already a known issue for years.
REE asked back in 2019/2020 to create a new real-time dispatch mechanism for reactive power, because Spain still relies on fixed dispatch based on emails, phone calls, even snail mail. There was a pilot project in 2022 which was successful (dispatching in less than 5 seconds) but proved to be very expensive, and therefore incompatible with the European Union's directives on creating market-ready regulation processes [1].
It's common policy to plan your resource consumption in the most economical way.
Couple that to a "next day" dispatching system.
Couple that to resources that failed to do their job (did not compensate enough reactive power, or even added extra reactive power instead of compensating).
Couple that to one of the most challenging electrical grids in the world.
When taking that context in consideration, "living in the edge" is not really a legitimate way to put it.
Interesting read. I reminded me of some stories a German guy who used to work for a Spanish utility told me (the guy lost his job at one of the first closed German nuclear facilities and now worked at the museum of a pumped storage power plant): he told us that the Spanish utility he worked for waited far too long to kick in gas power plants waiting for prices to rise further making tons of money by risking stability. I also learned from him that a lot German nuclear facilities are still running there generators only as weight to stabilize the network. (Actually he also told us that some utilities legally abuse the pumped storage to trade energy between networks). So it seems there are some strange incentives and necessities in today's system , that might explain the failures to react in time.
> I also learned from him that a lot German nuclear facilities are still running there generators only as weight to stabilize the network
The term for this is synchronous condenser. According to the system stability report 2023 [0] there were three of these in Germany in 2023 (source is in german, the term you're looking for is rotierender Phasenschieber). It is not clear if these are converted generators, most likely they are not former nuclear power plants, but likely located at the sites of former coal power plants because of the existing grid nodes. For the future this is a concept that is investigated to provide reactive power, in that case from former coal power plants.
> I also learned from him that a lot German nuclear facilities are still running there generators only as weight to stabilize the network.
We aren't. Pretty much the first things that get dismantled is the turbines and machinery that has no radiation exposure because you need space to maneuver, buffer, dismantle and decontaminate everything else that's coming out of the innards of the plant and actually is contaminated.
Maybe you can get some remaining use as reactive power provider done during the ~1 year that it takes for the bureaucracy to process the actual permit for dismantling [1] - but even during that time, restarting it again is practically impossible after the main coolant pipes have been flushed [2] (that happened shortly after the plant had been formally taken offline and all the uranium pellets were removed from the core, although I can't find out how many months that took - but it did happen in the same year as the shutdown, so less than 8 months).
The only thing that's being kept connected to the grid after that is the small portion that supplies the cooling for the cooldown pools where the freshly removed uranium pellets deplete enough material that they can be stored in CASTOR containers [3]. In addition, the high-voltage switching equipment is being kept alive in Landshut's case as the area of the former NPP is planned to be the end point of the SüdOstLink national grid expansion link and the power is supposed to be transferred from Ohu to the wider regional/state grid using the existing tie-ins of the former NPP [4].
If you want I can try to contact the utility handling the teardown about specifics, I live a few kilometers from there after all, but I doubt they're going to share much information given the obvious threat of Russian espionage.
It's also a workplace safety issue. You absolutely do not want electricity anywhere where you do not vitally need it, particularly no high voltage.
EDIT: Thanks to @closewith, indeed Biblis A's genset was converted for a "second life" as power regulator in 2011/2012 [5], but that's (at least from a cursory research) all I could find.
Had to read up on it as it was only hear say. But apparently RWE did this after Biblis was shut down [0] . They were already deconstructing other parts and the generators were in the non-nuclear part. No clue about other sites though
Ah, that explains things - I only looked at the history of the last three in Emsland, Neckarwestheim and Ohu because I assumed that everything else was far too much dismantled to still be operational in any form or shape. Thanks!
Last I heard they were aiming for sometime between July and October to have the full technical report ready and shared with the parlament and the EU commission.
This is Government's version and it shows.
REE boss was put there by the ruling party. Still they try to paint REE as a private operator now. It's not. Like many other orgs, it's a mix of private and public capital, ultimately controled by the government.
It's suspected that the blackout was caused because she overruled technicians' opinion, looking for a solar % record.
Not "enough thermal power stations" carefully avoids mentioning nuclear, that they want to erradicate.
Private companies are requesting the records of CECOEL conversation to be published, some have leaked their logs. In one of those, REE technicians readily admit that oscilations are caused by not enough nuclear in the mix.