ENERGY RESILIENCE
In the dark
WITH no immediate explanation for last month’s massive super-regional blackout across Spain, Portugal and parts of France, there are calls to review the resilience of the UK’s own electricity grid.
The security of any grid depends on maintaining the unwavering stability of the frequency of electricity output. This is much easier to achieve when coal or gas-fired plants predominate, rather than with solar or wind power. Spain is transitioning towards the latter; and just days before the outage, which was of the type that should never happen, Spain had run for a while on 100 percent renewable power.