Before the recent run of very hot summers, 2003 was remembered for having been one of Mallorca’s hottest. It was also a summer when the island suffered a major blackout. At ten to six in the afternoon of July 22, there was a total power outage. A technical failure in the transmission grid rendered the entire production system unusable. The system’s frequency became unstable and the protection system lifted the lines to prevent damage. Five hours before the outage, GESA - and we still referred to GESA then rather than Endesa - had described the rise in electricity demand as “unsustainable”.
By 9pm, power to most of Palma had been restored. In the rest of the island the situation was not nearly as positive. Some municipalities, Calvia was one of them, had to wait until after midnight for the power to come back on. The then president of the Mallorca Hoteliers Federation, Pedro Cañellas, lamented a “Third-World image” that was conveyed to tourists. Businesses suffered multiple losses.
It was in that year of the great blackout that Spain’s national grid company, Red Eléctrica, arrived in the Balearics to oversee the network. What existed at the time were two electrical subsystems. Mallorca and Minorca were connected. Ibiza and Formentera were connected. These two subsystems were wholly reliant on insular production, primarily from coal-fired power stations.
The first big change to this was in 2012 when the cable from the mainland to Santa Ponsa came into operation. Six years later, Mallorca was connected to Ibiza. All the islands were linked and were supported by a supply from the mainland that contributed 400 megawatts. To offer some context, it is now the case that the Balearics have installed generating capacity of 2,440 megawatts. The absolute record for electricity consumption was on August 3, 2017 - 1,400 megawatts. In other words, the islands today have around 1,000 megawatts of spare capacity.
New records of consumption can be expected, but it would be most unlikely that these would be a record of some 1,000 megawatts more than in August 2017. Meanwhile, Red Eléctrica contemplate an additional 400 megawatts from the second and controversial mainland cable. This has proved to be controversial in a way that Santa Ponsa never was because of an entry point in an area of natural beauty on the Bay of Pollensa, selected due to the sea route involving way less impact on posidonia sea grass meadows than were it to arrive in the port of Alcudia. Many argue that a Bay of Alcudia route should be used.
Regardless of the objections, there will be a second cable. This will represent further power from renewable sources. Sixty per cent or so of the electricity that currently arrives from the mainland is from renewables. The last coal-fired plant, Es Murterar in Alcudia, will eventually be closed down completely. Its present contribution, a maximum of 500 hours of production per annum, is over and above the 2,440 megawatts. Although the outage that affected the mainland last week has raised questions as to the wisdom of totally decommissioning Es Murterar, Red Eléctrica insist that it won’t be needed.
There have been other incidents since 2003. The most serious was in October 2018 when a ‘cap de fibló’ tornado struck Minorca. It took up to 56 hours to fully restore power. That was a weather event. Otherwise, capacity as it stands is in theory more than enough for the time being, and there will be more of it once the second cable becomes operative and because of ever-growing renewable supply. This growth nevertheless conflicts with the argument that there should be reduced energy consumption, while it also has to take into the account the eventual end to natural-gas-fired plants in the Balearics and the switch to renewables.
It is the latter, the hopes for renewables, that has led to a further hope - that of energy sovereignty for the Balearics. Part of the thinking behind this is that the islands would not be vulnerable to any disruptions that may occur on mainland Spain or mainland Europe. But as it implies isolation, a different vulnerability would exist. Were a self-reliant system to fail, there would be no back-up. And as the second cable has an estimated cost of up 1,200 million euros, three times the first cable, Red Eléctrica will be in for the long term.
Between them, the two cables - so it has been estimated - will be able to supply an average of 65% of demand in the Balearics. The bulk of this will be green and so fit with the ultimate target of 100% renewables for the region. However, if the production from the gas-fired plants is removed from the equation, much clearly needs to be done in terms of expanding renewables’ supply, which to all intents and purposes means solar.
In 2023, renewable energy in the Balearics accounted for 17% of installed capacity. For the necessary advances to be made, there have to be major infrastructure developments. At the same time, the mainland outage on the mainland has turned the spotlight on to renewables, and it might be noted that the Santa Ponsa cable, which draws on renewable sources, was out of action because of the outage.
The Spanish Government’s inquiry into what happened last week is examining various hypotheses, one of which is a solar blackout; another is an excess of renewables. While expert opinion is very much that renewables are the future, it is tempered by the view that development has been too fast. A professor of industrial engineering at the University of the Balearic Islands, Vicente José Canales, says: “Achievable goals must be set. It is possible that the world is not yet ready to rely solely on renewable energy.” He and the dean of the College of Industrial Engineers, Mateu Oliver, argue that there cannot be a system that is 100% renewables, “not even 75%”.
Oliver envisages renewable energies in the future being able to overcome current limitations, but these can’t be underestimated. At the time of the outage, 74% of production was from renewables. This was too high, when one takes into account the operations. Conventional energy can self-regulate if there are fluctuations. A photovoltaic plant, by contrast, automatically disconnects in order to avoid burning itself out. And so Canales insists there must be conventional sources as backups as these will rebalance the electrical system if it is disrupted.
Whether an excess of renewables was the root cause of the outage or not, the experience has in a way been valuable in that it has highlighted technical issues that the general public would probably have been unaware of, and the same can perhaps be said for politicians. The Balearics have wanted to go all out for renewables, a laudable aim but a seemingly flawed one as technology currently stands, while energy sovereignty is increasingly exposed as a potential liability. A question that does therefore raise itself concerns photovoltaic projects. No one surely doubts their desirability and the need for a renewables’ future, but does knowledge derived from the experience of the outage now feed in to the far from infrequent controversies that surround major projects in Mallorca?
The Council of Mallorca’s territorial and urban planning commission has recently reported in favour of four new large projects on rustic land. The opposition had denounced the Council’s intentions, based on regulations contained in the Mallorca Territorial Plan. Land classification and environmental/agricultural/landscape harm have all been reasons for challenging projects. Is there now another one? Where the left opposition are concerned, one would guess they would be reluctant to admit the possibility, as it was they, when in government, who made the bet on renewables. The Partido Popular are constantly faced by the whims of a climate-change-denying Vox, who will be considering the cause of the outage as closely as anyone. But it may just be that everyone pauses and takes a breath. Are we going too fast with renewables? At least for now.