The number of deaths in Spain due to the consequences of the serious blackout that has brought the country to its knees has risen to five. The latest victim is a 46-year-old woman in Alzira (Valencia) who was connected to an oxygen respirator as life support: she died after her machine was left without power due to the collapse of the electrical network.
The power collapse occurred in five seconds, a period of time in which there were "two successive losses of power generation, which the system was unable to absorb", causing the collapse to "point zero", the total collapse of the electrical system, at 12:33 on Monday. The cause of those voltage drops, with an interval of just a second and a half between them, followed 3.5 seconds later by the collapse, is the main knot that is being unraveled to trace the origins of the great darkness into which the Iberian Peninsula has sunk, as explained by the head of operations of the Spanish Electricity Network (REE), Eduardo Prieto.
"We will have to analyze why the two disconnections occurred, especially the second one that led to the collapse of the system," Prieto said. "We will have to verify the causes, analyze the power, the location, the conditions in which the disconnection occurred." But he also recognized as "very probable" that the generation source affected by the drop is solar , without giving further explanations.
On Monday, in those five seconds before the collapse, which caused "15 gigawatts of electricity to disappear from the grid", equivalent to 60% of Spain's energy demand - as the prime minister had reported - there was a peak in solar energy production in the southwestern area of Spain, in Extremadura. And renewables were supplying 78% of the country's electricity demand. The surplus of available energy would have caused an imbalance in the Iberian electricity grid, making it impossible to ensure the stability of the system, according to what the former president of Rete Elettrica, Jorge Fabra, hypothesized to TVE. A first imbalance would have been absorbed by the grid, while the second, with a domino effect, would have exceeded the system's response capacity, causing the collapse of the Spanish grid first and then the Portuguese one. And causing the disconnection of the interconnection with France.
(Online Union)