Overrelying on variable sun and wind makes it “very difficult” to cordon off parts of the electrical grid that function independently and supply critical facilities like hospitals during blackouts, she said, as well as restart power supplies once an outage has occurred.
“All countries should have an appropriate amount of baseload or at least acknowledge that they are dependent [on] their neighboring countries that have baseload [nuclear power],” she said, noting Spain’s frequent imports of electricity from France’s atomic-heavy grid.
Experts, too, argue a lack of stable generators didn’t help — but point to wider problems in Spain’s electricity system. “Having more baseload … could have helped prevent the blackout in Spain from escalating as severely as it did,” said Pratheeksha Ramdas, a senior power analyst at the Rystad consultancy.
But “the situation highlights a broader failure in grid design, coordination, and investment in grid resilience,” she added, including a lack of energy storage technologies and cross-border power links.
Estonia, an observer member of the nuclear alliance, argues the blackout should prompt EU countries to invest in all types of energy technologies, including atomic power. The bloc’s push to install “renewable energy [is] absolutely necessary and also for a very pragmatic reason — that is the cheapest source of energy at the moment,” said the country’s energy minister, Andres Sutt.
“But you then need [easily controllable] energy like grids, gas turbines, more storage, nuclear,” he told POLITICO.
