Spain’s Council of Ministers has approved a Royal Decree designed to increase the resilience of the country’s electrical system. The decree is a legislative intervention to address key vulnerabilities identified post-blackout by increasing storage, electrification and system oversight.
The new regulation aims to strengthen the power system following the widespread blackout on 28 April this year. The decree, initially rejected for political reasons, focuses on increasing energy storage capacity, electrification and facilitating the repowering of existing plants.
In terms of energy storage, the decree states that capacity must reach 22.5 GW by 2030. It also streamlines permitting processes with a focus on hybrid storage and generation plants. It also aims to secure more industrial grid connections “by setting the expiration of access and connection rights for demand at five years after they are granted, thus preventing hoarding and speculation”.
According to the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO), the decree also demands that a national repowering roadmap be developed within the next nine months. This roadmap, states MITECO, must include “technical, regulatory, and financial measures to incentivize equipment replacement and increase efficiency and energy production”.
The emphasis on deploying storage and reinforcing the grid is regarded as good news for the country’s system resilience. According to think tank Ember, Spain lags behind other European countries in grid strength and battery storage. As Europe’s fourth biggest power market, it only has the thirteenth largest battery storage fleet and is also one of the continent’s least well-connected systems.
There are other benefits of the decree. Importantly, it will allow for significantly greater oversight and management of voltage control obligations of electricity sector agents. And the National Commission for Markets and Competition will now be required to submit a quarterly report in this regard and the regulator will also complete an inspection of supply restoration capacities every three years.
According to the decree, system operator Red Eléctrica will need to prepare proposals for regulatory modification on responses to power oscillations, focused on the speed of voltage variation, scheduling of technical restrictions and definitions of procedure monitoring, etc.
Following the power blackout in April the Spanish government released a report that concluded the incident had a “multifactorial origin”. The three key elements that stood out in the report included insufficient voltage control capacity, oscillations creating difficulties to stabilise voltage and ‘apparently improper’ disconnections of generation plants. The new decree aims to directly address those key vulnerabilities.
