It is announced that it will take time to know the causes of the blackout. There is also the possibility that we never know it. This reality, in the face of success, little recognized, of having recovered the supply in less than twenty -four hours, justifies the anger of the president of the Government and the general bewilderment when seeing the capacity of the electrical system to achieve the most difficult and its inability to the most elementary.
This is the same opacity of the electric pool and the method of conformation of electricity prices, which are referenced to the most expensive energy price. This methodology has been blessed by Von der Leyen in the last directive of the electricity market. They speculate with generation assets to optimize benefits charged to consumer invoices. Two weeks before, due to the abundance of renewable power, they stopped the nuclear because with the low prices of the wholesale electricity market were not profitable.
Nuclear is the least flexible energy source. He stops automatically, but his start is slow and complex. On the contrary, renewable energies are the most flexible and modulable source, which can be hybridized with any technology such as storage. In addition, they lower the price of electricity and its cost tendency is decreasing.
Energy security today guarantees an energy system with the highest flexible energy capacity, which is what allows to adjust the supply and demand of real -time energy in any consumption center, reducing and displacing demand. That is not possible with nuclear or gas plants.
The low percentage of demand electrification and the limited development of battery storage, added to the lack of distributed energy resources, makes our energy system very not very flexible and susceptible to crisis due to the imbalance between centralized energy and decentralized and distributed energy, aggravated by the minimum capacity of electrical interconnection with France, which has barely grown since the last century before the inoperance of the European Commission.
So that a “national zero” is not repeated, we will have to take steps towards the transformation of the centralized electrical model towards an energy flexibility model supported by the proximity between the generation and consumption centers and the participation of the energy resources distributed in the market and in the coverage analysis by means of the aggregation of the demand.
The milestones of the transformation towards a flexible energy model are to end the situation of “Energy Island” of the Iberian Peninsula, disconnected from the European Electrical System, and denounce both the blockade of France and the passivity of the European Commission due to the breach of the objective of 15% of interconnection capacity, which in Spain does not reach 3%.
The hybridization of renewable facilities with storage batteries in all tensions is essential for adequate renewable progress. All renewable facilities, both large and small, new or existing, should necessarily have batteries.
The function that the structure groups have fulfilled in this blackout is the function that the self -consumption must fulfill with storage in each consumption center. The distributed generation increases the flexible capacity of the electrical system, ensures the supply and stability of the electricity grid. It is viable technologically and economically; But, although European directives do not establish any limitation to self -consumption, there are still regulatory barriers and the electrical sector itself that delay its implementation because they increase competition and, as a consequence, they lower prices.
In this blackout nobody talks about prices, but it is the background. All who now propose more nuclear, more gas and more networks, should talk about their costs and how they will be paid. In the current regulation all the costs and deficits of the electrical system are automatically transferred to the tolls paid by consumers in the electricity rate. From now on, payments will be added again. What they intend is an electric market without competence because it guarantees high prices of electricity and the lack of protection of consumers.
It is time to be belligerent as never before distrust of renewable energies.
