Authored by Giles Parkinson of Renew Economy. Reposted with permission.
One of the world’s leading experts in battery storage and demand flexibility says that Spain could have avoided its massive blackout this week if it had taken note of the lessons learned nearly a decade ago in South Australia.
As Spanish consumers – from the king all the way down to consumers left in the dark or stuck in lifts and trains – seek answers for the extraordinary events on Monday, more energy experts are pointing out that Spain’s grid was left vulnerable by its old-school thinking about centralized and supply-side control.
Some are pointing to the lessons learned from the “system black” in South Australia in 2016, which led to a wholesale rethink about the ways grid are managed and are able to respond to the type of major disruptions seen in Spain and Portugal.
Starved of grid flexibility
“Two blackouts, one root cause,” wrote Alex Schoch, the head of demand flexibility at Octopus Energy, now the biggest energy retailer in the UK and which is partly owned by Australia’s Origin Energy. “Spain 2025 (was) a grid starved of flexibility.”
Schoch has some deep insight into this. Before his current role as head of demand flexibility in the UK, and advising the UK market operator on transmission issues, Schoch was head of Tesla Energy’s global operations for three years from 2016 and 2019.
In that role, he played a key role in making sure the hardware and the know-how was delivered for the original “Tesla big battery” at Hornsdale that was built – as promised by CEO Elon Musk – in South Australia in less than 100 days.
The Tesla battery was a major part of the response to the South Australia blackout, and its success in helping mitigate the impacts of major disruptions such as a coal generator outages, or the loss of a transmission lines, has led to Australian building a massive portfolio of grid scale batteries.
That portfolio already stands at more than 5 GW and 10 GWh, in operation or commissioning, and will likely double again in the coming year. But, as Renew Economy pointed out on Tuesday, Spain has virtually no battery storage to speak of.
“Spain’s grid failure began with a loss of generation, triggering instability,” Schoch writes in a LinkedIn post. “The system couldn’t stabilize quickly enough, causing interconnectors to France to trip and leading to a loss of 15GW of power. Key factors included:
- Low inertia: 70% of Spain’s power came from renewables, lacking the inertia traditionally provided by fossil fuel plants.
- No rapid response: Scarce batteries and demand response meant reliance on slower-acting gas plants, hydro, and imports.
- South Australia’s blackout was triggered by storm damage, but the real issue was outdated protection settings: Wind farms disconnected due to voltage dips. The interconnector to Victoria overloaded and tripped.
- Both grids lacked the tools to recover from sudden shocks.
The sequence of events described by Schoch has been confirmed by the Spanish grid operator, Red Electrica, which has described a succession of big frequency excursions from which generators – including nuclear, coal, and gas – and the transmission lines to France could not recover.
Role of batteries
Schoch and other experts point out that battery storage might have been able to arrest those frequency excursions, preventing the cascading sequence of events that led to the blackout. Red Electrica has now confirmed that at one stage there was zero generation operating on the grid.
Schoch says the Tesla battery at Hornsdale – and those that followed – have been key to providing grid flexibility and security.
As an example, Hornsdale has provided synthetic inertia and fast frequency response (FFR) and reacted within 0.14 seconds of an outage. That compares to minutes for traditional generators.
He also notes that South Australia has focused on other distributed technologies, which can also play fast and smart on the grid in ways that traditional synchronous machines are not capable. These include aggregated rooftop solar, household batteries, and smart thermostats that balance supply and demand.
South Australia has since evolved from a grid hosting 41 per cent wind and solar in the year of the big blackout to an average 72 per cent in each of the last two years, and is now heading towards the state government target of 100 per cent net renewables in 2027.
Not only is that world leading, it is also remarkable because it includes no hydro, no geothermal energy and no biomass that usually contribute to other high renewable grids. And, Schoch points out, there have been zero major outages.
But it’s not just high renewable grids where batteries and demand response are the new go-to tool to maintain grid stability.
In Ontario, the Canadian province with a near 60 per cent nuclear share, the local grid operator has commissioned two of the world’s biggest batteries – including one from Hornsdale owner Neoen – to provide back-up for its grid.
That is needed because most of its nuclear units will be offline for three years in the coming decade for refits and refurbishment, and because – if you lose a big unit such as a nuclear power station all of a sudden – then you need back up.
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Pumped hydro was once the go-to for such emergencies, but their lack of flexibility, and their soaring cost because of the inflation in civil construction works, mean that battery storage is now the preferred technology.
Schoch, meanwhile, offers some solutions for the Spanish grid, including setting a target of 20 GW of grid scale batteries by 2030, and making sure they can provide synthetic inertia and frequency management. He also suggests allowing household batteries to provide grid services.
The second is to use smart devices to provide real time reaction to grid signals and unlock the “hidden” demand flexibility. “Aggregate everything: Pool EVs, heat pumps, and industrial loads into virtual power plants (VPPs).”
He also suggests that protection settings should be updated to ensure solar and wind farms stay online, interconnectors should be doubled, and energy markets should reward speed. “Pay for milli-seconds,” he suggests, because the current 15 minute activations time for demand response is simply too slow.
Finally, he suggests ending fossil fuel favors: “Phase out subsidies for gas peakers,” he suggests. Because they don’t help much in a grid crisis, as Australia has found.
