The president of Redeia, Beatriz Corredor
“Insinuation” of guilt raised by Beatriz Corredor takes the case of the Iberian blackout to court.
Iberdrola will take legal action against the president of Red Eléctrica, the operator of Spain’s electrical system, for statements in which it attributed responsibility for the April 28 blackout to the producing companies, Spanish media reported this Monday.
According to “legal sources” cited by the news agency EFE and the newspaper, the company will initiate “legal actions” against Beatriz Corredorpresident of Red Eléctrica (REE).
What was said by Corredor
Corredor stated, in a hearing in the Spanish Senate on September 11, that the blackout was due to non-compliance by electricity generating companies, without mentioning any specific one. Even so, he referred to a photovoltaic unit in the Badajoz area, which the Spanish press has identified as belonging to Iberdrola and which Beatriz Corredor said had “behaved inappropriately” on the day of the blackout, which made the system “much more vulnerable”.
Despite not having mentioned the name of Iberdrola, the company considers that “this insinuation” by Beatriz Corredor attacks “its honor”, the same legal sources told EFE.
What REE says
In a report on the blackout presented on June 18, REE attributed the episode to non-compliance with obligations by energy producing companies and rejected accusations of poor planning.
“If the generators with obligation to comply with dynamic voltage control — generators connected to the system at the time of the incident — had they complied, there would have been no blackout”, said the general director of Operations at Red Elétrica, Concha Sánchez.
According to REE, following significant fluctuations in the system from 12:03 pm local time on April 28 (half an hour before the blackout), a series of production plants shut down, leading to a total blackout, but they did it “incorrectly”failing to fulfill obligations, since at that time the tension in the system was “totally within the limits” established legally.
REE refused to have carried out “poor planning” in the days and hours before the blackout, as pointed out by the Spanish Government in a report and the Spanish association of energy producers Aelec, arguing that the collapse would have been avoided if companies with production units had fulfilled the obligations they had that day at the request of the operator.
What the Spanish government says
The report by the Spanish Government, also in June, held both REE and the electricity producing companies responsible for the blackout, concluding that there was poor planning on the part of Red Eléctrica, but also failure to fulfill obligations on the part of the producers.
The one on April 28 was caused by a succession of sudden shutdowns of renewable production, and subsequent loss of synchronization with the European continental grid, according to the panel of European experts investigating the incident.
The report published this month, prepared by 45 experts from network operators and regulators from 12 countries, classifies the incident as “scale 3” — the most serious level foreseen by European legislation — and describes it as “the most significant occurrence in the European electricity system in more than 20 years”, affecting millions of citizens and causing serious disruptions to essential services.
According to analysis by the European Network of Electricity Transmission Network Managers (ENTSO-E), the sequence of failures began at 12:32 pm (Brussels time), when several solar and wind power plants in southern Spain suddenly disconnected from the grid, followed by additional losses in regions such as Granada, Badajoz, Seville and Cáceres.
The report notes that analyzes carried out by regional coordination centers on the eve of the incident had not identified significant risks.
