Blackouts Across Spain Highlight The Problems In The Power Sector
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On April 28th, a sudden frequency drop in Spain’s power grid triggered cascading shutdowns, leaving millions without power. Everything stopped as people struggled to power their homes, get to work, or even go to the bank. Portugal, which is heavily connected to Spain’s grid, experienced similar losses. With power restored experts are now discussing the causes, the solutions, and the risks it highlighted. The first thing people noticed is that every blackout is impacting humans more than before. This sounds self-explanatory when you think about human progress but there is a unique difference in just the last few years, where society is having an exponentially tougher time without power, largely from accelerating electrification. “The increasing electrification of critical services such as transport, communications, heating, and cooling, which are key elements of the low-carbon transition, mean that society’s dependency on electricity is growing,” said Jianzhong Wu, Professor of Multi-Vector Energy Systems, University of Cardiff. Not only is power demand rapidly increasing, putting more strain on legacy grids, but our personal dependency on power throughout the day has also exploded. AI is only going to increase this, with projections that by 2030 many grids globally may see 10% of their demand from AI related use cases. AI demand is probably scarier because you can’t time it to avoid peak hours as you would by charging a car at night. For example, schools and businesses that integrate AI are not going to be doing that in the middle of the night, in fact the exact opposite, as they will need real time responses during the day. This concentrates demand which is tougher to handle. Growing demand is coming up against grids that have increasingly variable power sources, given the increase in renewables. Many are citing that the head of Spain’s electricity operator, REE,…
Filed under: News - @ May 1, 2025 3:25 am