Energy is one of the main areas of specialization of economist Daniel Lacalle. Among other things he shows it that he was voted for five consecutive years in the Top 3 of the best general, oil and electricity managers of the Thomson Reuters ranking and occupied different responsibilities in Repsol and Enagás.
Lacalle seems very serious what has happened with the blackout, and thinks that it reflects the “absolute incompetence of a management team of Electric Red (Now Redeia) that has dismantled his technical team to include politicians without the slightest experience, without the slightest knowledge of energy, and also sectarian ».
Denies that there would have been no Notices: «The warnings of associations of electrical network operators have been giving since 2019, speaking of the risk it has for the electricity grid to have a system dependent on the renewable with very little base generation ».
More recently, remember the blackout that occurred a week ago in Chamartín (Madrid), and the cuts that occur periodically in the industries called interruptible. They are notices that have preceded «a blackout of a magnitude that those of our age had never seen. In other blackouts, telephony worked, but this has been an absolute debacle. The current government has been especially sectarian in what has led to this situation, but we must not take responsibility to the Rajoy government, which closed nuclear centrals against all logic ».
As the professor José María Martínez-Val, the economist, sets the problem in which the Government and Redeia have opted for «an energy mix that has no support or inertia power, also pointed out in this newspaper. Renewables do not give inertia or stability to the energy system because they are intermittent and volatile ». The worst thing is that «just before the collapse we were operating with approximately 78 % renewable and only 11.5 % nuclear and less than 3 % gas. With this, the system becomes unstable and cannot throw, and when it tries to throw, most of the energy has no inertia. It is as if you had a huge amount of engines, but none with sufficient power to restart the system ».
Remember that Redeia tried to restart the system with 80 % renewable and could not. France solved the problem immediately going to nuclear. «The hours passed here and a minimum emergency supply was not even restored. It shows that it is a much more serious problem than they say.
The cyber attack joke
«First they tried to sell the story that this was a cyber attack; that Spain was the world center of danger and that it was being attacked. Then they tried to sell what was happening in Italia, Germany And I don’t know where, ”says Lacalle. Its conclusion is the same of Martínez-Val: that it was a failure produced by the excessive weight of renewables in our energy mix.
If the debate was normal and not ideological, as is happening in Spain to favor renewables, the logical thing would be to extend the duration of nuclear power plants, as is happening in other countries. Lacalle is clear that in Spain it will not happen. «The blackouts will be the norm as we continue like this. We are not adding another risk factor: the fact that the entire electrification of the car park now comes. We are going crazy ».
