The author's point is that Spain's electricity is very cheap compared to other European countries thanks to its great electricity mix, etc.
The reality is that Spain's electricity is cheap because it is relatively insulated from Europe's core network, because its interconnections with other countries are limited. In financial words, there is a spread with the rest of Europe because the ways to arbitrage that spread are extremely limited. If Spain was located near Germany and well interconnected, their prices would look like Germany's. And while cheap energy is pictured by op as a good thing, Spain understands very well that higher prices are good for its renewables industry, and is pressing for more interconnections[1].
The overall tone of the article feels like the author is here to extoll the virtues of renewables.
To add to this, Spain gets it gas from Algeria, the rest of europe gets it from Russia and the middle east. So yeah, It's easy to have better prices when your gas is comparatively free from disruptions.
Sure, Algeria does have gas pipelines to Europe. Two of them actually. The smaller one goes to Spain and Spain as we see in this article has lower electricity wholesale prices.
But er, the bigger Algerian pipeline goes to Italy, a country with notoriously high energy prices. So if Algerian gas was the secret that's actually a big problem for you.
This is an interesting point about energy market balancing but it has causality backwards. Spain simply has a better energy mix than Germany, no matter how big the spread between the countries is as a function of interconnectedness.
The article is a mix of facts and figures on the supply side. However, the real reason for the current cheap prices is the lack of demand. Spain's economy isn't doing well and they have hurt their tourism industry with politics. That's most of the reason for the temporarily cheap power that they mostly import from their neighbor. Being dishonest about their energy policy is pure politics.
There have been protests against tourism in Spanish cities, esp. Barcelona.
As always, the protests are really about local issues (lack of housing, jobs, etc) and foreigners are being scapegoated. A lot of this has a dark edge - e.g. locals spraying water on people that appear foreign to them. The framing around sustainability and 'over-tourism' allows the far left to get in on the xenophobia that's been so useful to the far right. Much easier to attack foreigners than actually come up with solutions to deliver more housing or jobs.
Media narratives aside, these incidents have not affected tourism at all. Spain is and continues to be a massive tourism destination, and the average tourist has never even heard of any of this.
Spain's energy policy could easily be improved, but saying that Spain's economy isn't doing well is disingenuous. In terms of GDP, it's one of the countries with the fastest growth in the EU [1].
Also, our economy is becoming more diversified, precisely thanks to lower energy prices that attract industries that previously gravitated towards Germany and Eastern Europe. [2]
I'm curious about how politics have hurt tourism industry, though, if you could elaborate.
It's easy to win the fastest growing award when it has been doing so poorly before. Youth unemployment is at a near twenty year low of 24%, down from recent years around 30%.
As for politics hurting tourism, there's some formal policies restricting airbnbs and placing higher tourism related taxes on over-encumbered areas, but I think most of the detraction is the anti-tourism protests from locals, which were quite large in 2024-2025. You'd have to consider local sentiment as "politics" for the statement to really be true, I think.
How have they hurt tourism? According to the data here [1] tourism has been going up every year since 1996 except for a moderate hit during the 2008 recession and a big hit during COVID.
Spain also has pretty sensible legislation that is somewhat green. For large public areas the lowest allowed AC setting is 27°C / 81°F. Where-as in America you'll go to a mall and it'll be 65°F. https://www.catalannews.com/politics/item/spain-limits-air-c...
Probably doesn't make a ton of difference. But I found that very respectable. It made me hopeful they have other basic green sensibilities.
Sounds good to me. One thing I hate in the summer is being dressed in shorts and t-shirt then going inside and freezing because the AC is on full blast.
You forget the times with an overproduction of electrical energy in Germany. Then they sell it for a negative price to the neighbor countries. Later, when they need more energy they buy it back at a premium. It is good business for neighbor countries with enough storage (pumping hydro, etc.).
Spain's neighbors could also have lower energy prices with more interconnection to Spain. The whole network diversifies, which would be more beneficial for Europe as a whole.
That would raise electricity prices in Spain just like prices in Sweden - which traditionally had low prices - went up with the 'diversification' of the European distribution network. While these price effects were mostly seen in the southern half of the country due to the way Sweden is divided into 4 price regions with most of the interconnects being found in the southern-most region the recently inaugurated 'Aurora' interconnect with Finland caused prices in the north of Sweden to shoot up [1].
The issue is that Spain has three interconnected neighbours (France, Portugal and Morocco) and all of them are overflowing with electricity.
The best candidate for lowering prices would be France, but France would most likely re-export that electricity to other countries, and paying to build up the internal grid to carry electricity that is neither bought by nor sold to French actors isn't very attractive.
Ideally Spain would interconnect with Italy, but that's more expensive.
Hvdc in the ocean requires way less right of way than hvdc over land. Running oceanic hvdc from Spain to Germany might have some trouble in the English channel where it would be in territorial waters.
France systematicaly refuses to increase the power of their interconect with Spain, as well as to make a gas pipe that would provide cheap Algerian gas to the rest of europe.
That being said, building new interconnections makes no economic sense for France. The country has no unserved consumers close to the border. That means any electricity imported from Spain would have to be carried further. That involves grid spending paid for by french consumers, without any benefit for them.
The same goes for gas pipelines. No one enjoys big infrastructure projects for stuff they don't really need.
That's not my point. My point is that the price spread between EU electricity markets speaks more to the availability of interconnections than to the virtues of one country's electricity mix. The article gets to that conclusion because that's what it was looking for.
The one question the article leaves open, but which is pretty relevant, is the question about who should pays for stability services to the grid.
Which is bad, it's a market and infrastructure failure. Negative prices are to get generators to turn off.
A new feature on solar inverters is curtailment mode so they can be remote shutdown when the grid goes negative, since if you're on wholesale energy pricing you'll be charged if you keep driving the grid.
This is a lesson in how electricity isn't really a commodity e.g. it's very very difficult to send some electrons from one side of the world to another.
But all commodities are like this. It is actually pretty easy to send some electrons great distances, or heck at least it's a well understood, solved problem. It's just that those interconnections haven't been built yet.
Heck, oil is probably the "default" example of what a commodity is, but we're now all acutely aware of what happens when moving that oil from one place to another becomes exceedingly difficult.
> or heck at least it's a well understood, solved problem.
It is not. As a case in my point, Spain had a blackout last year (and I completely believe they are competent professionals - the task is just hard).
> It's just that those interconnections haven't been built yet.
They haven't been built because the grid isn't just a technical problem. It's also a socioeconomic problem, and adding new interconnections would require finding who needs to pay for it ; and currently, that question has no answer.
Hard is relative. Sure, it's hard, but it's a lot simpler problem than something like being able to consume tropical fruit in a temperate country in the middle of winter.
The difference of course is that the invisible hand of the market gets that fruit into grocery stores. For various relatively good reasons, power is driven by very visible hands.
> Sure, it's hard, but it's a lot simpler problem than something like being able to consume tropical fruit in a temperate country in the middle of winter.
"Brain surgery? Well, that's not exactly rocket science..."
There are quite a few visible hands driving the fruit industry. Trade agreements, tariffs, water rights, disease/blight controls, and of course weather events/patterns are regularly in the news and discussed as it pertains to the cost and availability of various fruits (and veg).
Off the top of my head, we've recently had shortages of fresh strawberries because of weather in California, a shortage of peas because of weather too, and various changes in Trump's tariffs were done to try and alleviate the rising cost of certain fruit and veg.
Commodities are traded on type, quantity, and place. Oil of a specific grade at a specific port. Pork bellies (no longer traded) of a specific grade in Chicago. Etc.
If you want the commodities elsewhere, you have to provide for transportation. Same for electricity. Grids (or grid sections) where supply outpaces local demand and transmission to remote grids can hit negative spot prices even when neighboring grids haven't.
Unfortunately in Britain at least politicians are absolutely dead set on taking the piss / abusing this by e.g. adding huge amounts of subsidy and stealth taxes into what should be price discovery mechanisms (or for example when was the last time you heard someone talking about how cheap renewables are and discuss the CfD schemes).
> when was the last time you heard someone talking about how cheap renewables are and discuss the CfD schemes
All the time? Every single HN discussion about this ends mentioning CfD, often as if it's some secret nobody knows about even though the CfD strike prices are often headline news when they're agreed.
Although this financial instrument dates from late last century, its use in energy markets is much newer, the UK began using CfDs for electricity about a decade ago.
So, yeah, if you recall conversation about wholesale electricity prices back in 2010 they wouldn't have mentioned CfDs for the same reason they didn't mention the effect of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it hadn't happened yet. Back then renewable electricity generation schemes were subsidised very differently.
The relative isolation you cite for power being cheap were true a decade ago when power was expensive. The author is correct in extolling the virtues of renewables.
The past few years has also had Solar continuing to decrease in price so its increasingly going to be the primary choice. On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas. Most of the EU will be running on Wind and Solar in the coming years, its a change that is now rapidly occuring based entirely on the rare economics. Solar and Wind are half the price of anything else.
Don’t underestimate the corrupt politics of some countries, especially Germany. There are individuals actively working against the global cost curve and trying to misallocate the capital to gas at the large scale. Katherine Reiche is the primary example. She’s pushing for building as much capacity for gas plants as possible, instead of choosing battery storage as the cheapest option.
Ha, yes, a lot of deniers/delayers are going on about how Germany "wasted" billion on renewables, when in fact they had a booming solar industry, which got nuked by politicians, who changed the policies, as can be seen in 39C3 video "Recharge your batteries with us".
Was the subsidy system which was in effect in 2010's unsustainable? I think so, yeah. But the changed policies resulted in companies producing solar going bust, and the Chinese firms, which were doing fine, were able to buy out the patents and know how.
So, did Germany waste billions? Yes, but by letting the solar producers go bust.
Not most of EU but geographically large and diverse and low-latitude countries will. Spain has winds from three different sea areas and is known sunny, so they are in a good position.
Well that' doesn't always scan. Austria has a lot of wind, sun and hydro so its energy prices should be in line with Sweden, Norway, Denmark amongst the cheapest in Europe, and yet it's routinely amongst the more expensive in the EU.
Trading across borders seems to be a part of this story.
If your local price is high you can import, if it's low you can export.
If you're at the end of a grid and/or your transmission capacity is limited your price has the possibility to go higher or lower without that damping mechanism.
Electricitymaps has a pricing layer which seems to show central Europe moving in sync when I randomly check it:
And the counter intuitive thing is that people in countries with lots of renewables and not so many external links (e.g. Scandinavia with hydro) might be against adding more links since it will increase electricity prices.
So energy in Spain is cheap because they produce a lot but can't sell a lot easily, and Austria/Central Europe is expensive because they sell their domestic energy too easily?
If this is what you meant, then it sounds like an argument against free trade, if it means you keep ending up with the short stick.
Free trade doesn't always benefit everyone equally, only a net benefit overall. It's a bit like how people often misinterpret the second law of thermodynamics "but the entropy decreased when the ice froze!"
You have to think about these things as a portfolio rather than just by minimum price.
If you have a steel mill for example you need to be able to basically guarantee a certain level of energy production to run it viably because the risk of there not being any power during adverse weather is enough to make it unviable (you can't just turn these things off). This is the reason why gas and nuclear probably aren't going away (or at least shouldn't).
If the grid balance is dominated by bursty renewables then you can potentially price the stable / on-demand generation out of the market (or lead to a massive contango to incentivise said producers)
Probably when combined with batteries it is half the price.
There are some colder areas in northern europe especially where solar doesnt work as well but they also tend to be better served for hydro (which can also store power).
Solar works also in the north, except in the winter of course, and it complements wind pretty well. So solar does make economic sense and is actively built in the north too.
Northern locales though have a much greater energy need for heating in the winter. So the "battery" solutions can often just be cheap heat batteries because there is not so much a thing as "waste heat" - that heat can be used directly without worrying as much about efficiency losses in conversion.
There are already a bunch of examples of Northern locales using these heat batteries - just heat up a big block of something when energy is cheap and solar/wind are overproducing, then use a network of insulated pipes to distribute that heated water.
The problem is that nuclear reactors are huge so you're never going to build that many of them compared to wind turbines (thousands) or solar panels (millions).
France plans to build a series of six reactors for its EPR2 programme with each reactor scheduled for completion 1-2 years apart, but that is only expected to reduce costs by 30% compared to the (hugely expensive) EPR.
Small modular reactors hope to improve things but it's far from clear they will end up any cheaper. Historically making reactors bigger makes them more efficient. The Rolls Royce SMR is just under 1/3rd of the size of the EPR so even if successful any cost reductions are not likely to be dramatic.
Europe was spending 200 billions / year on gas from russia. I imagine they could try to build 100 reactors for that price, but it would take a couple of years I imagine...
How much would it cost to build out batteries which cover entire continent's electricy needs for say three weeks (as there can be 2-3 week lulls of no wind and no sun in Europe in the winter)? Cause that sounds like a lot of batteries. Not to mention, if a freak 4 week lull occurs, we'll go back to Middle Ages for a week.
Australia's CSIRO studied this for Australia, renewables were half the cost of nuclear, factoring in storage and transmission for both renewables and nuclear (yes, nuclear also needs storage because energy demand varies with time). Australia is uniquely endowed with sun and land, so other countries/regions may arrive at different results.
Solar still produces even in overcast conditions, during the day. If it's light/medium overcast, most of which Germany usually is it still produces 50-80% of nominal. It only really doesn't produce anything at night or when it snows.
"But what if thing thing that never happens were to happen?"
We'd probably go deep into hydro, fire up every gas peaker plant, and through skyrocketing prices incentivize everyone to switch to emergency diesel generators where possible.
You're talking about a once-in-100+-years event. We'll deal with it the same way we dealt with the various oil crises.
(for Australia it is 5, for other countries it might be 8)
Once you get to that "nice to have" problem of what to do about the remaining 3% of power needs it would probably make most sense to synthesize and store gas (methane/hydrogen) from electricity when solar and wind is overproducing. Gas can be stored cheaply for long durations. The roundtrip efficiency is poor but it's still cheaper than nuclear power on the windiest sunniest day.
The nuclear + carbon lobbies would of course prefer to model green energy transitions by pretending that the wind and sun simultaneously turn off for 2 weeks at a time every year and that electricity can only be stored in very expensive batteries. This is not realistic.
It might not be quite that good in less sunny countries. Similar modest overbuilding of wind and solar in Denmark is simulated to get to about 90% with 12h of storage. This is still good enough though.
>On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas.
I'm a little bit sad that pumped hydro doesn't get more attention in the discussion. It might be too late for it to matter, with improvements in battery prices and ongoing lithium discoveries. But that only underscores the fact that it should have been allowed to matter twenty years ago. Utilities have slow-walked solar all around the world because of concerns about the grid stability, which has been well within the reach of pumped hydropower to fix since many years ago. In fact major pumped hydropower projects were mostly carried out in the United States during the nuclear power optimism era.
It is a little destructive to construct pumped hydro reservoirs. But it generally isn't as damaging as a conventional hydroelectric dam. The reason lies in the source of the water. In a conventional dam, you need a lot of water flowing in from up high, so you dam a major river near its lower cataracts. This disrupts the migration of fish and animals along the river and impacts the whole ecosystem of the rather large drainage basin upstream, and disrupts the migration of fish. But when a closed-loop pumped storage reservoir is created above an existing lake, usually a much less important stream is selected. Its immediate valley is still inundated, but the area of effect is much less. It does tend to prolong the use of the existing dam, but we are already preserving basically all existing dams.
It might still be appropriate in some places where imports are less affordable like Latin America or it might appeal to protectionists in the West. In general, hydro is usually cheap.
Anyone can install batteries anywhere at a fairly minimal local fire risk.
A dam is a major mechanical structure which if it fails will straight up obliterate downstream towns, and as such requires a numerous specialized engineering designs and on going maintenance to retain basic safety.
I think Spain is showing that majority renewables can work, if you are willing to work through the pain. Someone needs to lead the way and figure out how to make it work, so I am glad they are doing it. I do think this article and most information is focused on cheer-leading rather than telling it like it is.
This title of the article is misleading. Spain is one of the cheapest power generation markets, but In the article it states "Spanish households pay above the EU average". Then the reason is stated "Other system costs are rising. The flip side of getting energy cheap is paying more elsewhere to keep the system stable.".
Spain of course also had a blackout and the article states "every country in Europe needs to modernise how it handles voltage stability". I believe that's code for "its harder to manager power transmission grids with renewables". I have been told by a power engineer that read the report on the blackout that the authors are going out of their way not to explicitly blame renewables, but these things that caused the blackout are bigger issues now due to the switch to renewables.
But it makes sense for Spain to continue down this path and not pollute with coal or rely on other countries for gas imports.
Jan Rosenow doesn't know what he is talking about, power markets are not only day ahead market, but there are a lot of other maturities, CAL27 is higher in Spain than France or the Nordics.
Well, it’s HN. People love to spread articles that push renewables. In the meantime, France has the cleanest and cheapest electricity among the large countries in Europe.
it's in the article: wholesale energy price is among the cheapest in eu, but retail price to residents (including tolls, fees and taxes) is well over eu average. tells you something about spain ...
Spain is one of the largest buyers of Russian LNG [1], even doubled in March compared to February 2026 and has been linked to servicing "shadow fleet" tankers carrying Russian oil [2].
bs. all of the eu is doing this. the top importer is hungary, then france. and that's the official figures, not counting imports "rerouted" through other countries.
regardless of inflamed speeches eu simply cannot operate without that energy. should have thought about that before starting a war with russia. best of lucks!
EU is gradually stopping all energy purchases from Russia. Long term contracts for LNG purchases stop end of this year, pipeline gas late next year. Oil imports from Russia are planned to come to end late next year, too.
The days of Russian energy exports to EU are basically permanently over, and will not be reinstated even after the war has ended.
The reality is that expensive electricity in the EU is by design. The EU ETS imposes heavy taxes on fossil fuels (and they are set to increase even more), which in turn causes the price of electricity to rise. Fully renewable electricity generation is still a long way off, so this will continue for a long time. But it is entirely a self-imposed political problem and could easily be fixed by getting rid of the EU ETS or capping the price of emissions at a more reasonable level.
> Damian Cortinas, chair of ENTSO-E’s board, told the Financial Times that “the issue is not about renewables” but about the grid’s ability to manage “fast voltage variations” that can destabilise the system. Unusual oscillations triggered a cascade of plant disconnections, and grid managers lost control. The real lesson is not that Spain has gone too far on wind and solar,
YES THEY DID, they went as far as making nuclear power plants shut down due to negative prices so their reliable stable power wasn't a pacemaker anymore and it blew up in their faces. And this was a topic on TV shows with several experts alerting of this FOR MONTHS before the blackout.
Sure, there are new technologies to stabilize solar and wind's fluctuating outputs but they are no just plug and play. Those are very, very complex systems that take years to set up properly. While there are nuclear power plants are just there collecting dust because the EU pressured Spain to make them unprofitable to maintain so they would be shut down.
Luckily, the US-Israel-Iran war made the EU leadership turn and now they want nuclear. I hope it's not too late.
1. Stable power grids are much easier with a mix of generation sources that includes substantial rotating mass and baseload generators.
2. Nuclear is awesome from a climate change and energy security point of view, and it would be amazing if it were cheaper or more valued.
When power was primarily generated by thermal plants with big rotating masses, we got frequency control implicitly from the inertia of those generators. When there was a demand spike, the generators handled the millisecond to few seconds regime just by their inertia, while the seconds to minutes regime was handled by plant control systems increasing throttles or starting more peaker plants.
I disagree that renewables themselves are the problem. Cheap solar energy does not have to mean that we shut down all the uneconomical generation sources, nor does it mean that we cannot do FCAS with modern technology.
Battery electric storage systems have actually eaten much of the FCAS market in the USA, where they can respond way more effectively and efficiently than other systems in the 1 to 10 second regime. By and large, we don't store solar energy for use overnight - we store it (or really any energy) for use in smoothing short demand spikes.
I would love to see more nuclear, and more advanced nuclear. Modern designs are safe, effective, and amazingly capable. They just aren't as cheap as paving the world with solar cells or burning natural gas left over as a fracking byproduct.
However, several officials and energy experts have rejected the idea that renewables are to blame. EU energy commissioner, Dan Jørgensen, stated that there was "nothing unusual" about the electricity mix at the time of the blackout, and that the outage was not due to a "specific source energy". [1]
> made the EU leadership turn and now they want nuclear
They don't _actually_ want nuclear, luckily it's just lip service. Because it doesn't solve the problem surfaced by the US-Israel-Iran war: You'd still be dependent on other countries for your (nuclear) fuel needs.
Sure, if you ignore the fact that Kazakhstan supplies about half of the world's uranium. Canada accounts for only 10%, and Sweden currently produces zero due to its extremely poor ore quality.
The most promising additional uranium source is Australia. But if Europe wants security it should be sourcing it domestically - which just isn't going to happen.
Spain's blackout was exactly 1 year ago, no other blackouts since. And the mix of nuclear stayed almost the same.
That was not a stabilization problem per-se, but the companies that had to do the stabilization just didn't although the were being paid for that. Please read the final report.
The government refused to protect nuclear plants when prices went negative for a long time, so of course they were turned off because the companies were losing money. That was the obvious plan all along.
And no more blackouts because now they are running nuclear 24/7 to keep things stable.
And again, it's not completely Spain's government fault as it obviously came from the EU and their anti-nuclear stance.
Nuclear was working as usual the day of the blackout and the previous days.
What does it even mean to "protect the nuclear"? Give them free money for the sake of it? They are already facilities being paid to keep the system in sync, or "protected" as you say, and they are paid very handsomely. But someone got greedy, it seems.
For one year we had to hear that the blackout was to blame on the renewables, and now that the final report is out and places zero blame on the shoulders of the renewables, we couldn't read anything in the newspapers (electric sector is a main supporter of local press through ads or indirect ownership), or we have to read incredible bad blame redirects like "this is on the government for not protecting nuclear".
Wait, so not giving unprofitable power plants subsidies to keep operating at a loss is "anti-nuclear"?
And sure, it is a Really Good Idea to contract additional intertia to keep the grid stable. But why shouldn't that be done on the open market? Why pay a fortune for spinning a reactor's turbine at idle load when running a gas peaker plant's turbine at idle works just as well for a fraction of the price?
You can run nuclear (or gas or whatever) at a minimum to keep the network stable. Read my comments. Solar and wind are very unstable and unless you have the latest generation hardware (costing hundreds of millions) you need some stable source.
> And this was a topic on TV shows with several experts alerting of this FOR MONTHS before the blackout.
"Experts" that now are being proved wrong. In Spain we have a good share of "experts" that are practically hired by the electric industry to parrot their interests in TV and other media for months or even years. Half politicians end their career either in Iberdrola or Endesa or Naturgy, the other half in some bank.
Also worth tracking whether consumption is increasing. Rebound Effect can kick in - when energy prices fall most people use more energy, produce/consume more junk, use more heat/cooling etc. Its like dealing with very low interest rates. It can produce a whole lot of brainless behaviour.
Some countries are already (accidentally) solving this problem.
The problem there is that they can't upgrade the grid fast enough at the neighborhood level. Combine that with residential electricity contracts where you pay the spot market price, and suddenly you've got a whole bunch of people who want to source or drain electricity at the same time, with a total capacity which far exceeds what their local grid is physically capable of.
The solution is to change a grid connection fee which depends on the peak load, where drawing/supplying a steady 1kW during the day is significantly cheaper than doing 12kW for 2 hours and 0kW for 22 hours. You're incentivized to spread out your load, so you are less likely to fall for needless consumption of "free" electricity.
The author's point is that Spain's electricity is very cheap compared to other European countries thanks to its great electricity mix, etc.
The reality is that Spain's electricity is cheap because it is relatively insulated from Europe's core network, because its interconnections with other countries are limited. In financial words, there is a spread with the rest of Europe because the ways to arbitrage that spread are extremely limited. If Spain was located near Germany and well interconnected, their prices would look like Germany's. And while cheap energy is pictured by op as a good thing, Spain understands very well that higher prices are good for its renewables industry, and is pressing for more interconnections[1].
The overall tone of the article feels like the author is here to extoll the virtues of renewables.
[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/8e94079c-585f-11e4-b331-00144feab...
To add to this, Spain gets it gas from Algeria, the rest of europe gets it from Russia and the middle east. So yeah, It's easy to have better prices when your gas is comparatively free from disruptions.
Sure, Algeria does have gas pipelines to Europe. Two of them actually. The smaller one goes to Spain and Spain as we see in this article has lower electricity wholesale prices.
But er, the bigger Algerian pipeline goes to Italy, a country with notoriously high energy prices. So if Algerian gas was the secret that's actually a big problem for you.
What are you talking about? Spain is one of the biggest importer of Russia LNG, at 25% https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-remains-spains-to...
Check your facts.
This is an interesting point about energy market balancing but it has causality backwards. Spain simply has a better energy mix than Germany, no matter how big the spread between the countries is as a function of interconnectedness.
The article is a mix of facts and figures on the supply side. However, the real reason for the current cheap prices is the lack of demand. Spain's economy isn't doing well and they have hurt their tourism industry with politics. That's most of the reason for the temporarily cheap power that they mostly import from their neighbor. Being dishonest about their energy policy is pure politics.
> Spain's economy isn't doing well and they have hurt their tourism industry with politics.
I don't live in Spain. And this is the first I have heard about their politics keeping tourists away. Can you elaborate?
There have been protests against tourism in Spanish cities, esp. Barcelona.
As always, the protests are really about local issues (lack of housing, jobs, etc) and foreigners are being scapegoated. A lot of this has a dark edge - e.g. locals spraying water on people that appear foreign to them. The framing around sustainability and 'over-tourism' allows the far left to get in on the xenophobia that's been so useful to the far right. Much easier to attack foreigners than actually come up with solutions to deliver more housing or jobs.
Media narratives aside, these incidents have not affected tourism at all. Spain is and continues to be a massive tourism destination, and the average tourist has never even heard of any of this.
You should correct this article, they don't know Spain's tourism is in shambles either. https://apnews.com/article/spain-record-foreign-tourists-5aa...
Spain's energy policy could easily be improved, but saying that Spain's economy isn't doing well is disingenuous. In terms of GDP, it's one of the countries with the fastest growth in the EU [1].
Also, our economy is becoming more diversified, precisely thanks to lower energy prices that attract industries that previously gravitated towards Germany and Eastern Europe. [2]
I'm curious about how politics have hurt tourism industry, though, if you could elaborate.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-euro-indicators/w... [2] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/stellantis-chinas-leapmo...
It's easy to win the fastest growing award when it has been doing so poorly before. Youth unemployment is at a near twenty year low of 24%, down from recent years around 30%.
As for politics hurting tourism, there's some formal policies restricting airbnbs and placing higher tourism related taxes on over-encumbered areas, but I think most of the detraction is the anti-tourism protests from locals, which were quite large in 2024-2025. You'd have to consider local sentiment as "politics" for the statement to really be true, I think.
How have they hurt tourism? According to the data here [1] tourism has been going up every year since 1996 except for a moderate hit during the 2008 recession and a big hit during COVID.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_Spain
Spain also has pretty sensible legislation that is somewhat green. For large public areas the lowest allowed AC setting is 27°C / 81°F. Where-as in America you'll go to a mall and it'll be 65°F. https://www.catalannews.com/politics/item/spain-limits-air-c...
Probably doesn't make a ton of difference. But I found that very respectable. It made me hopeful they have other basic green sensibilities.
> Spain also has pretty sensible legislation that is somewhat green. For large public areas the lowest allowed AC setting is 27°C / 81°F.
As a red blooded American, this is the funniest thing I’ve seen all weekend.
Sounds good to me. One thing I hate in the summer is being dressed in shorts and t-shirt then going inside and freezing because the AC is on full blast.
Hmm. Everyone should just disconnect Germany, let them freeze, and enjoy cheap electricity?
You forget the times with an overproduction of electrical energy in Germany. Then they sell it for a negative price to the neighbor countries. Later, when they need more energy they buy it back at a premium. It is good business for neighbor countries with enough storage (pumping hydro, etc.).
Spain's neighbors could also have lower energy prices with more interconnection to Spain. The whole network diversifies, which would be more beneficial for Europe as a whole.
That would raise electricity prices in Spain just like prices in Sweden - which traditionally had low prices - went up with the 'diversification' of the European distribution network. While these price effects were mostly seen in the southern half of the country due to the way Sweden is divided into 4 price regions with most of the interconnects being found in the southern-most region the recently inaugurated 'Aurora' interconnect with Finland caused prices in the north of Sweden to shoot up [1].
[1] https://www.aftonbladet.se/minekonomi/a/Exwx4A/elprissmocka-...
The issue is that Spain has three interconnected neighbours (France, Portugal and Morocco) and all of them are overflowing with electricity.
The best candidate for lowering prices would be France, but France would most likely re-export that electricity to other countries, and paying to build up the internal grid to carry electricity that is neither bought by nor sold to French actors isn't very attractive.
Ideally Spain would interconnect with Italy, but that's more expensive.
There has already been a serious proposal for a HVDC cable from Morocco to the UK. If that's possible, why not go for Spain-Germany?
Hvdc in the ocean requires way less right of way than hvdc over land. Running oceanic hvdc from Spain to Germany might have some trouble in the English channel where it would be in territorial waters.
Spain to UK might make more sense.
Spain has also floated he idea of a HVDC cable to the UK, but it's never happened.
Sometimes, headlines are out of control.
France systematicaly refuses to increase the power of their interconect with Spain, as well as to make a gas pipe that would provide cheap Algerian gas to the rest of europe.
An interconnection is being built up as we speak.
That being said, building new interconnections makes no economic sense for France. The country has no unserved consumers close to the border. That means any electricity imported from Spain would have to be carried further. That involves grid spending paid for by french consumers, without any benefit for them.
The same goes for gas pipelines. No one enjoys big infrastructure projects for stuff they don't really need.
Then you'd have people run extension cords across the border and selling their cheap electricity at inflated prices to their freezing neighbor.
That's not my point. My point is that the price spread between EU electricity markets speaks more to the availability of interconnections than to the virtues of one country's electricity mix. The article gets to that conclusion because that's what it was looking for.
The one question the article leaves open, but which is pretty relevant, is the question about who should pays for stability services to the grid.
normally when you buy electricity it costs money!
Many times negative spot prices.
Which is bad, it's a market and infrastructure failure. Negative prices are to get generators to turn off.
A new feature on solar inverters is curtailment mode so they can be remote shutdown when the grid goes negative, since if you're on wholesale energy pricing you'll be charged if you keep driving the grid.
It is worth mentioning that the linked FT article supporting the claim is from 12 years ago.
Yeah, that's not new. Here's another article from 2025, in the wake of the blackout.
https://www.politico.eu/article/france-needs-eu-push-on-powe...
This is a lesson in how electricity isn't really a commodity e.g. it's very very difficult to send some electrons from one side of the world to another.
But all commodities are like this. It is actually pretty easy to send some electrons great distances, or heck at least it's a well understood, solved problem. It's just that those interconnections haven't been built yet.
Heck, oil is probably the "default" example of what a commodity is, but we're now all acutely aware of what happens when moving that oil from one place to another becomes exceedingly difficult.
> or heck at least it's a well understood, solved problem.
It is not. As a case in my point, Spain had a blackout last year (and I completely believe they are competent professionals - the task is just hard).
> It's just that those interconnections haven't been built yet.
They haven't been built because the grid isn't just a technical problem. It's also a socioeconomic problem, and adding new interconnections would require finding who needs to pay for it ; and currently, that question has no answer.
Hard is relative. Sure, it's hard, but it's a lot simpler problem than something like being able to consume tropical fruit in a temperate country in the middle of winter.
The difference of course is that the invisible hand of the market gets that fruit into grocery stores. For various relatively good reasons, power is driven by very visible hands.
> Sure, it's hard, but it's a lot simpler problem than something like being able to consume tropical fruit in a temperate country in the middle of winter.
"Brain surgery? Well, that's not exactly rocket science..."
There are quite a few visible hands driving the fruit industry. Trade agreements, tariffs, water rights, disease/blight controls, and of course weather events/patterns are regularly in the news and discussed as it pertains to the cost and availability of various fruits (and veg).
Off the top of my head, we've recently had shortages of fresh strawberries because of weather in California, a shortage of peas because of weather too, and various changes in Trump's tariffs were done to try and alleviate the rising cost of certain fruit and veg.
It is actually very easy to move electrons. I only need to get on an aeroplane to move a lot of electrons around.
Commodities are traded on type, quantity, and place. Oil of a specific grade at a specific port. Pork bellies (no longer traded) of a specific grade in Chicago. Etc.
If you want the commodities elsewhere, you have to provide for transportation. Same for electricity. Grids (or grid sections) where supply outpaces local demand and transmission to remote grids can hit negative spot prices even when neighboring grids haven't.
That it is treated as such speaks volumes to the craft of the people designing and maintaining the grid.
Unfortunately in Britain at least politicians are absolutely dead set on taking the piss / abusing this by e.g. adding huge amounts of subsidy and stealth taxes into what should be price discovery mechanisms (or for example when was the last time you heard someone talking about how cheap renewables are and discuss the CfD schemes).
> when was the last time you heard someone talking about how cheap renewables are and discuss the CfD schemes
All the time? Every single HN discussion about this ends mentioning CfD, often as if it's some secret nobody knows about even though the CfD strike prices are often headline news when they're agreed.
I've basically only just seen this stuff started to be discussed critically in the media in fairly recent years.
not including $work discussions with energy traders.
> in fairly recent years
Although this financial instrument dates from late last century, its use in energy markets is much newer, the UK began using CfDs for electricity about a decade ago.
So, yeah, if you recall conversation about wholesale electricity prices back in 2010 they wouldn't have mentioned CfDs for the same reason they didn't mention the effect of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it hadn't happened yet. Back then renewable electricity generation schemes were subsidised very differently.
This is correct. The price for electricity has been increased by 2x-10x in the Nordics because of the interconnect with Germany.
I mean it is hard to argue with the number - I believe everyone will benefit for more interconnections. More energy to Europe, more money to Spain.
And for the numbers it seems obvious that renewables are a fundamental part of the picture.
The relative isolation you cite for power being cheap were true a decade ago when power was expensive. The author is correct in extolling the virtues of renewables.
The past few years has also had Solar continuing to decrease in price so its increasingly going to be the primary choice. On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas. Most of the EU will be running on Wind and Solar in the coming years, its a change that is now rapidly occuring based entirely on the rare economics. Solar and Wind are half the price of anything else.
Don’t underestimate the corrupt politics of some countries, especially Germany. There are individuals actively working against the global cost curve and trying to misallocate the capital to gas at the large scale. Katherine Reiche is the primary example. She’s pushing for building as much capacity for gas plants as possible, instead of choosing battery storage as the cheapest option.
Ha, yes, a lot of deniers/delayers are going on about how Germany "wasted" billion on renewables, when in fact they had a booming solar industry, which got nuked by politicians, who changed the policies, as can be seen in 39C3 video "Recharge your batteries with us".
Was the subsidy system which was in effect in 2010's unsustainable? I think so, yeah. But the changed policies resulted in companies producing solar going bust, and the Chinese firms, which were doing fine, were able to buy out the patents and know how.
So, did Germany waste billions? Yes, but by letting the solar producers go bust.
Not most of EU but geographically large and diverse and low-latitude countries will. Spain has winds from three different sea areas and is known sunny, so they are in a good position.
Well that' doesn't always scan. Austria has a lot of wind, sun and hydro so its energy prices should be in line with Sweden, Norway, Denmark amongst the cheapest in Europe, and yet it's routinely amongst the more expensive in the EU.
Trading across borders seems to be a part of this story.
If your local price is high you can import, if it's low you can export.
If you're at the end of a grid and/or your transmission capacity is limited your price has the possibility to go higher or lower without that damping mechanism.
Electricitymaps has a pricing layer which seems to show central Europe moving in sync when I randomly check it:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes?sig...
And the counter intuitive thing is that people in countries with lots of renewables and not so many external links (e.g. Scandinavia with hydro) might be against adding more links since it will increase electricity prices.
So energy in Spain is cheap because they produce a lot but can't sell a lot easily, and Austria/Central Europe is expensive because they sell their domestic energy too easily?
If this is what you meant, then it sounds like an argument against free trade, if it means you keep ending up with the short stick.
Free trade doesn't always benefit everyone equally, only a net benefit overall. It's a bit like how people often misinterpret the second law of thermodynamics "but the entropy decreased when the ice froze!"
Economists would say that the money coming in outweighs the higher costs and therefore you could redistribute that money and everyone comes out ahead.
Whether that happens in real life is a different question.
>Economists would say that the money coming in
Does that money go directly into my pocket so I can afford the more expensive energy? Or does it go into the pocket of private energy companies?
Because I feel like there's some faults with this "free market", which is mostly just socializing losses and privatizing profits.
And what if the energy companies are owned by foreign investors?
That would be economic colonialism with extra steps.
But for the end user, whether you're being ripped off by a local or a foreign energy oligarch, it doesn't really matter, people just want to pay less.
Electricity is expensive in Central Europe because the ETS system (carbon trading) has made fossil based production expensive.
We’re right in the middle of the transition with maximum volatility swinging between extremely cheap renewables and expensive fossil plants.
You have to think about these things as a portfolio rather than just by minimum price.
If you have a steel mill for example you need to be able to basically guarantee a certain level of energy production to run it viably because the risk of there not being any power during adverse weather is enough to make it unviable (you can't just turn these things off). This is the reason why gas and nuclear probably aren't going away (or at least shouldn't).
If you need predictable price buy futures.
If they increase in price then firm production is stimulated to build to meet the gap.
https://www.next-kraftwerke.com/knowledge/futures-market
If the grid balance is dominated by bursty renewables then you can potentially price the stable / on-demand generation out of the market (or lead to a massive contango to incentivise said producers)
1/5th the price of nuclear.
Probably when combined with batteries it is half the price.
There are some colder areas in northern europe especially where solar doesnt work as well but they also tend to be better served for hydro (which can also store power).
Solar works also in the north, except in the winter of course, and it complements wind pretty well. So solar does make economic sense and is actively built in the north too.
The UK hit a record of 42% peak solar generation around midday one day last month.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/24/uk-solar-generation-h...
Northern locales though have a much greater energy need for heating in the winter. So the "battery" solutions can often just be cheap heat batteries because there is not so much a thing as "waste heat" - that heat can be used directly without worrying as much about efficiency losses in conversion.
There are already a bunch of examples of Northern locales using these heat batteries - just heat up a big block of something when energy is cheap and solar/wind are overproducing, then use a network of insulated pipes to distribute that heated water.
So sad we could not apply economy of scale for nuclear... The main reason solar and batteries are so cheap is economy of scale.
I don’t think we have really tried. At least not in the last couple of decades.
The problem is that nuclear reactors are huge so you're never going to build that many of them compared to wind turbines (thousands) or solar panels (millions).
France plans to build a series of six reactors for its EPR2 programme with each reactor scheduled for completion 1-2 years apart, but that is only expected to reduce costs by 30% compared to the (hugely expensive) EPR.
Small modular reactors hope to improve things but it's far from clear they will end up any cheaper. Historically making reactors bigger makes them more efficient. The Rolls Royce SMR is just under 1/3rd of the size of the EPR so even if successful any cost reductions are not likely to be dramatic.
Europe was spending 200 billions / year on gas from russia. I imagine they could try to build 100 reactors for that price, but it would take a couple of years I imagine...
How much would it cost to build out batteries which cover entire continent's electricy needs for say three weeks (as there can be 2-3 week lulls of no wind and no sun in Europe in the winter)? Cause that sounds like a lot of batteries. Not to mention, if a freak 4 week lull occurs, we'll go back to Middle Ages for a week.
Australia's CSIRO studied this for Australia, renewables were half the cost of nuclear, factoring in storage and transmission for both renewables and nuclear (yes, nuclear also needs storage because energy demand varies with time). Australia is uniquely endowed with sun and land, so other countries/regions may arrive at different results.
If you live in Australia, have a house and roof, you're a bloody idiot if you didnt install solar.
You don't even need a roof. If you have enough land then a ground mount system is more convenient and easier to maintain.
I think by having a roof GP meant lives in a house instead of an apartment. If you don't have your own roof you probably don't have land either.
Solar still produces even in overcast conditions, during the day. If it's light/medium overcast, most of which Germany usually is it still produces 50-80% of nominal. It only really doesn't produce anything at night or when it snows.
Yes this is one thing that surprised me owning solar. Some days its pretty cloudy and I can still get 2kw or so from my 7kw max.
"But what if thing thing that never happens were to happen?"
We'd probably go deep into hydro, fire up every gas peaker plant, and through skyrocketing prices incentivize everyone to switch to emergency diesel generators where possible.
You're talking about a once-in-100+-years event. We'll deal with it the same way we dealt with the various oil crises.
You can't fire up capacity you don't have. Your scenario implies a massive idle stock of power plants.
Who's going to build and run them? They'd be enormously expensive because they'd almost never sell power.
(Of course the answer is if you build 3 weeks of battery storage you can pretty obviously build 4).
But what do we do when the sun isn't shining?
Well what are we doing if the straight of hormuz isn't hormuzing?
Demand will adapt via price signals. Same story as in every market.
You would likely get to 97% green energy first with 5-8 hours of storage: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
(for Australia it is 5, for other countries it might be 8)
Once you get to that "nice to have" problem of what to do about the remaining 3% of power needs it would probably make most sense to synthesize and store gas (methane/hydrogen) from electricity when solar and wind is overproducing. Gas can be stored cheaply for long durations. The roundtrip efficiency is poor but it's still cheaper than nuclear power on the windiest sunniest day.
The nuclear + carbon lobbies would of course prefer to model green energy transitions by pretending that the wind and sun simultaneously turn off for 2 weeks at a time every year and that electricity can only be stored in very expensive batteries. This is not realistic.
It might not be quite that good in less sunny countries. Similar modest overbuilding of wind and solar in Denmark is simulated to get to about 90% with 12h of storage. This is still good enough though.
https://xcancel.com/enn_nafnlaus/status/1565923581246091264
> (as there can be 2-3 week lulls of no wind and no sun in Europe in the winter)
This is simply entirely untrue. Europe's a big place, there's not a single day ever where there is no sun in it.
>On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas.
I'm a little bit sad that pumped hydro doesn't get more attention in the discussion. It might be too late for it to matter, with improvements in battery prices and ongoing lithium discoveries. But that only underscores the fact that it should have been allowed to matter twenty years ago. Utilities have slow-walked solar all around the world because of concerns about the grid stability, which has been well within the reach of pumped hydropower to fix since many years ago. In fact major pumped hydropower projects were mostly carried out in the United States during the nuclear power optimism era.
It is a little destructive to construct pumped hydro reservoirs. But it generally isn't as damaging as a conventional hydroelectric dam. The reason lies in the source of the water. In a conventional dam, you need a lot of water flowing in from up high, so you dam a major river near its lower cataracts. This disrupts the migration of fish and animals along the river and impacts the whole ecosystem of the rather large drainage basin upstream, and disrupts the migration of fish. But when a closed-loop pumped storage reservoir is created above an existing lake, usually a much less important stream is selected. Its immediate valley is still inundated, but the area of effect is much less. It does tend to prolong the use of the existing dam, but we are already preserving basically all existing dams.
It might still be appropriate in some places where imports are less affordable like Latin America or it might appeal to protectionists in the West. In general, hydro is usually cheap.
Pumped hydro is objectively worse then batteries.
Anyone can install batteries anywhere at a fairly minimal local fire risk.
A dam is a major mechanical structure which if it fails will straight up obliterate downstream towns, and as such requires a numerous specialized engineering designs and on going maintenance to retain basic safety.
The depreciation of a dam versus batteries can can weigh the benefits towards dams.
I think Spain is showing that majority renewables can work, if you are willing to work through the pain. Someone needs to lead the way and figure out how to make it work, so I am glad they are doing it. I do think this article and most information is focused on cheer-leading rather than telling it like it is.
This title of the article is misleading. Spain is one of the cheapest power generation markets, but In the article it states "Spanish households pay above the EU average". Then the reason is stated "Other system costs are rising. The flip side of getting energy cheap is paying more elsewhere to keep the system stable.".
Spain of course also had a blackout and the article states "every country in Europe needs to modernise how it handles voltage stability". I believe that's code for "its harder to manager power transmission grids with renewables". I have been told by a power engineer that read the report on the blackout that the authors are going out of their way not to explicitly blame renewables, but these things that caused the blackout are bigger issues now due to the switch to renewables.
But it makes sense for Spain to continue down this path and not pollute with coal or rely on other countries for gas imports.
Jan Rosenow doesn't know what he is talking about, power markets are not only day ahead market, but there are a lot of other maturities, CAL27 is higher in Spain than France or the Nordics.
https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/market-data-hub
Well, it’s HN. People love to spread articles that push renewables. In the meantime, France has the cleanest and cheapest electricity among the large countries in Europe.
Maybe it's cheap compared to other European countries but that doesn't mean it's cheap. Electricity in Spain is expensive.
it's in the article: wholesale energy price is among the cheapest in eu, but retail price to residents (including tolls, fees and taxes) is well over eu average. tells you something about spain ...
Might be because the article doesn’t tell you the whole story.
Power grid is the limiting factor, not power plant. Transporting energy can cost more than generating them.
Spain is one of the largest buyers of Russian LNG [1], even doubled in March compared to February 2026 and has been linked to servicing "shadow fleet" tankers carrying Russian oil [2].
Moral bankruptcy.
[1] https://cepa.org/article/spains-baffling-russian-gas-addicti...
[2] https://kyivindependent.com/spain-escorts-shadow-fleet-vesse...
bs. all of the eu is doing this. the top importer is hungary, then france. and that's the official figures, not counting imports "rerouted" through other countries.
regardless of inflamed speeches eu simply cannot operate without that energy. should have thought about that before starting a war with russia. best of lucks!
EU is gradually stopping all energy purchases from Russia. Long term contracts for LNG purchases stop end of this year, pipeline gas late next year. Oil imports from Russia are planned to come to end late next year, too.
The days of Russian energy exports to EU are basically permanently over, and will not be reinstated even after the war has ended.
Ha, Europe didn't start the war and seems like Russia is only able to export half of what they used to despite re-routing much to China and India.
https://energyandcleanair.org/january-2026-monthly-analysis-...
The reality is that expensive electricity in the EU is by design. The EU ETS imposes heavy taxes on fossil fuels (and they are set to increase even more), which in turn causes the price of electricity to rise. Fully renewable electricity generation is still a long way off, so this will continue for a long time. But it is entirely a self-imposed political problem and could easily be fixed by getting rid of the EU ETS or capping the price of emissions at a more reasonable level.
Yeah, crippling Europe in the long term for short term gain might not be the best idea - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/15/critical...
It's for long term gain. Energy independence, combating climate change which will cost more to mitigate than the energy costs.
why would you do that
It seems many markets have punitive pricing on electricity, california being one egregious example.
In most places, if you buy more of something, you are a good customer, it is usually more economical to sell to you and you get a discount.
In california people who use more kilowatts, pay more.
Punitive pricing is a great thing.
The less energy you spend to deliver value, the better for everyone.
I can think of many many examples of using electricity as a greater value to society than not using it.
You misread my comment.
If someone can deliver the same greater value to society using less electricity than you, they should be rewarded.
Shhhh.... Don't let Sam Altman find out.
> Damian Cortinas, chair of ENTSO-E’s board, told the Financial Times that “the issue is not about renewables” but about the grid’s ability to manage “fast voltage variations” that can destabilise the system. Unusual oscillations triggered a cascade of plant disconnections, and grid managers lost control. The real lesson is not that Spain has gone too far on wind and solar,
YES THEY DID, they went as far as making nuclear power plants shut down due to negative prices so their reliable stable power wasn't a pacemaker anymore and it blew up in their faces. And this was a topic on TV shows with several experts alerting of this FOR MONTHS before the blackout.
Sure, there are new technologies to stabilize solar and wind's fluctuating outputs but they are no just plug and play. Those are very, very complex systems that take years to set up properly. While there are nuclear power plants are just there collecting dust because the EU pressured Spain to make them unprofitable to maintain so they would be shut down.
Luckily, the US-Israel-Iran war made the EU leadership turn and now they want nuclear. I hope it's not too late.
I agree with you on a few points:
1. Stable power grids are much easier with a mix of generation sources that includes substantial rotating mass and baseload generators.
2. Nuclear is awesome from a climate change and energy security point of view, and it would be amazing if it were cheaper or more valued.
When power was primarily generated by thermal plants with big rotating masses, we got frequency control implicitly from the inertia of those generators. When there was a demand spike, the generators handled the millisecond to few seconds regime just by their inertia, while the seconds to minutes regime was handled by plant control systems increasing throttles or starting more peaker plants.
I disagree that renewables themselves are the problem. Cheap solar energy does not have to mean that we shut down all the uneconomical generation sources, nor does it mean that we cannot do FCAS with modern technology.
Battery electric storage systems have actually eaten much of the FCAS market in the USA, where they can respond way more effectively and efficiently than other systems in the 1 to 10 second regime. By and large, we don't store solar energy for use overnight - we store it (or really any energy) for use in smoothing short demand spikes.
I would love to see more nuclear, and more advanced nuclear. Modern designs are safe, effective, and amazingly capable. They just aren't as cheap as paving the world with solar cells or burning natural gas left over as a fracking byproduct.
Old power station turbines can be repurposed as inertia services via a stability market. Example in the UK: https://www.neso.energy/news/deeside-power-station-begins-wo...
Batteries are sweeping stability markets wherever they are set up. They're simply cheaper and better at it.
I'm not sure this is true in the UK at least, which may be because the grid operator is conservative / cautious https://www.energy-storage.news/uk-grid-forming-batteries-mi...
> By and large, we don't store solar energy for use overnight - we store it (or really any energy) for use in smoothing short demand spikes.
This really depends on the amount of battery storage installed. In California we now see battery discharging through to the morning.
https://engaging-data.com/california-electricity-generation/
No that's not the case:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...> made the EU leadership turn and now they want nuclear
They don't _actually_ want nuclear, luckily it's just lip service. Because it doesn't solve the problem surfaced by the US-Israel-Iran war: You'd still be dependent on other countries for your (nuclear) fuel needs.
> You'd still be dependent on other countries for your (nuclear) fuel needs.
Like Canada and in the future also Sweden? Two really hostile countries to be dependent on.
Sure, if you ignore the fact that Kazakhstan supplies about half of the world's uranium. Canada accounts for only 10%, and Sweden currently produces zero due to its extremely poor ore quality.
The most promising additional uranium source is Australia. But if Europe wants security it should be sourcing it domestically - which just isn't going to happen.
Dependency on nuclear fuel is less of a problem because you don't need to re-fuel a station often. Lack of gas creates a much more urgent problem.
Spain's blackout was exactly 1 year ago, no other blackouts since. And the mix of nuclear stayed almost the same.
That was not a stabilization problem per-se, but the companies that had to do the stabilization just didn't although the were being paid for that. Please read the final report.
No blackout for a year: nothing to see here.
People didn’t do what they said they’d do: No problem with the system it’s the people that didn’t do what they said they would do.
The government refused to protect nuclear plants when prices went negative for a long time, so of course they were turned off because the companies were losing money. That was the obvious plan all along.
And no more blackouts because now they are running nuclear 24/7 to keep things stable.
And again, it's not completely Spain's government fault as it obviously came from the EU and their anti-nuclear stance.
Nuclear was working as usual the day of the blackout and the previous days.
What does it even mean to "protect the nuclear"? Give them free money for the sake of it? They are already facilities being paid to keep the system in sync, or "protected" as you say, and they are paid very handsomely. But someone got greedy, it seems.
For one year we had to hear that the blackout was to blame on the renewables, and now that the final report is out and places zero blame on the shoulders of the renewables, we couldn't read anything in the newspapers (electric sector is a main supporter of local press through ads or indirect ownership), or we have to read incredible bad blame redirects like "this is on the government for not protecting nuclear".
Wait, so not giving unprofitable power plants subsidies to keep operating at a loss is "anti-nuclear"?
And sure, it is a Really Good Idea to contract additional intertia to keep the grid stable. But why shouldn't that be done on the open market? Why pay a fortune for spinning a reactor's turbine at idle load when running a gas peaker plant's turbine at idle works just as well for a fraction of the price?
You can run nuclear (or gas or whatever) at a minimum to keep the network stable. Read my comments. Solar and wind are very unstable and unless you have the latest generation hardware (costing hundreds of millions) you need some stable source.
> And this was a topic on TV shows with several experts alerting of this FOR MONTHS before the blackout.
"Experts" that now are being proved wrong. In Spain we have a good share of "experts" that are practically hired by the electric industry to parrot their interests in TV and other media for months or even years. Half politicians end their career either in Iberdrola or Endesa or Naturgy, the other half in some bank.
Also worth tracking whether consumption is increasing. Rebound Effect can kick in - when energy prices fall most people use more energy, produce/consume more junk, use more heat/cooling etc. Its like dealing with very low interest rates. It can produce a whole lot of brainless behaviour.
Some countries are already (accidentally) solving this problem.
The problem there is that they can't upgrade the grid fast enough at the neighborhood level. Combine that with residential electricity contracts where you pay the spot market price, and suddenly you've got a whole bunch of people who want to source or drain electricity at the same time, with a total capacity which far exceeds what their local grid is physically capable of.
The solution is to change a grid connection fee which depends on the peak load, where drawing/supplying a steady 1kW during the day is significantly cheaper than doing 12kW for 2 hours and 0kW for 22 hours. You're incentivized to spread out your load, so you are less likely to fall for needless consumption of "free" electricity.