UK wind farms generate record 22.7 GW in a day, enough to power 22 million homes

On April 16, Spain’s electric grid ran on 100% alternative energy. At the time of the outage, more than 75% of the electricity came from renewable sources, according to Red Electrica data. On April 21, Spain’s solar production met as much as 79% of demand, reaching a record level of 20,120 megawatts. A few minutes before the blackout, about 60% of the electricity on Spain’s grid was coming from solar power. Some believe that Spain’s electric grid, which produces the second-most solar energy in Europe after Germany, was weakened by its reliance on solar power.

REE, the Spanish grid operator, identified two incidents of power generation loss, probably from solar plants, in Spain’s southwest that caused instability in the electric system and led to a breakdown of its interconnection with France. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, however, ruled out an excess of renewable energy as a cause of the network’s collapse. According to Sanchez, since Spain’s nuclear power stations had not resumed operating on Tuesday, the day after the outage, they were no more resilient than renewables. But this analysis does not account for the whole picture. As energy expert John Kemp explains, “Spain’s nuclear stations have all been shut down automatically by passive safety systems which respond to any sign of a loss of power from the grid by dropping control rods into reactor cores to stop the reaction.” The fact that nuclear power can operate 90% of the time, providing baseload power, and that France’s grid, which generates most of its electricity from nuclear power, remained operational, did not deter Sanchez from defending renewable energy.