Iberdrola will take legal action against the president of Red Eléctrica, the operator of Spain’s electrical system, for statements in which it attributed responsibility for the April 28 blackout to production companies, Spanish media reported today.
According to “legal sources” cited by the news agency EFE and the newspaper El Mundo, the company will initiate “legal actions” against Beatriz Corredor, president of Red Eléctrica (REE). Beatriz Corredor stated, in a hearing in the Spanish Senate on September 11, that the blackout was due to non-compliance by electricity generating companieswithout mentioning any specific ones.
Even so, he referred to a photovoltaic unit in the Badajoz area, which the Spanish press has identified as belonging to Iberdrola and which Beatriz Corredor said had “behaved inappropriately” on the day of the blackout, which made the system “much more vulnerable”. Despite not having mentioned the name of Iberdrola, the company considers that “this insinuation” by Beatriz Corredor attacks “her honor”the same legal sources told EFE.
In a report on the blackout presented on June 18, REE attributed the episode to non-compliance with obligations by energy producing companies and rejected accusations of poor planning. “If the generators with an obligation to comply with dynamic voltage control – the generators connected to the system at the time of the incident – had complied, there would not have been a blackout“, said the general director of Operations at Red Elétrica, Concha Sánchez.
According to REE, after significant fluctuations in the system from 12:03 local time on April 28th (half an hour before the blackout), a series of production plants shut down, leading to a total blackout, but they did so in an “incorrect” way, failing to comply with obligations, since at that time the voltage in the system was “totally within the limits” established legally.
REE refused to have carried out “poor planning” in the days and hours before the blackout, as pointed out by the Spanish Government in a report and the Spanish association of energy producers Aelecarguing that the collapse would have been avoided if companies with production units had fulfilled the obligations they had that day at the request of the operator.
O report presented by the Spanish Government, also in June, held both REE and electricity producing companies responsible for the blackoutconcluding that there was poor planning on the part of Red Eléctrica, but also failure to fulfill obligations on the part of the producers.
The Iberian blackout on April 28 was caused by a succession of sudden shutdowns of renewable production, and subsequent loss of synchronization with the European continental grid, according to the panel of European experts investigating the incident.
The report published this month, prepared by 45 experts from network operators and regulators from 12 countries, classifies the incident as “scale 3” — the most serious level foreseen by European legislation — and describes it as “the most significant occurrence in the European electricity system in more than 20 years”, affecting millions of citizens and causing serious disruptions to essential services.
According to analysis by the European Network of Electricity Transmission Network Managers (ENTSO-E), the sequence of failures began at 12:32 (Brussels time), when several solar and wind power plants in southern Spain suddenly disconnected from the grid, followed by additional losses in regions such as Granada, Badajoz, Seville and Cáceres. The report notes that analyzes carried out by regional coordination centers on the eve of the incident had not identified significant risks.