Without explanations and sowing doubts

Pedro Sánchez attacks private operators despite not providing the cause of the blackout. The president says nuclear power plants hindered the restoration of electricity.

Although he has not yet explained the causes of the unprecedented blackout that paralyzed all of Spain this Monday, the Prime Minister yesterday lashed out at private electricity system operators and nuclear energy advocates. Pedro Sánchez is thus repeating the strategy followed in previous crises such as the pandemic, the spiraling inflation, or the floods last October that devastated the outskirts of Valencia: pointing fingers before offering a reasonable explanation for what happened. In his appearance after the Council of Ministers' monograph on the electricity crisis following the National Security Council meeting, he simply promised to thoroughly investigate what happened, keeping all possibilities open, including the scenario that the electricity grid had been sabotaged or suffered a cyberattack, despite the fact that a few hours earlier both the sole operator of the system, the state-owned company Redeia, and the European Commission had ruled them out. In other words, far from offering certainty, 24 hours after the blackout, Sánchez was busy spreading suspicions.

The Prime Minister excused the glaring lack of information to the public during the first hours of the blackout, as a way of saying that he should have done so when there was data to be made public. However, the truth is that his two interventions, while much of the country was without power, did nothing to shed light on the public's situation. At both six in the evening and eleven at night, Sánchez limited himself to an account of what had happened and the complicated tasks of gradually restoring service throughout the country thanks to aid from France with its nuclear production and from Morocco thanks to its hydroelectric plants. In this regard, the leader of the main opposition party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, reported that he had obtained more detailed information regarding the critical situation that left the entire Iberian Peninsula without power from Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro, who by mid-afternoon had already pointed to serious disturbances in the frequency that provides stability to the electrical system coming from our country, than from the inhabitant of Moncloa Palace.

The government's relationship with the electricity sector has been strained in recent years due to the insistence of Sánchez and his former Vice President for Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, currently the second-in-command at the European Commission, on imposing their ideological vision on energy planning in the eurozone's fourth-largest economy, inevitably conditioned by the lack of interconnections with the rest of the continent, which barely represent 3% of the total. Yesterday, he summoned representatives of the main producers and the grid operator to a meeting at the Moncloa Palace shortly after having put them in the spotlight in the public eye.

Following Monday's events, the decision to marginalize nuclear energy, contrary to what most neighboring countries are doing and the obvious need for sources with sufficient backup capacity in a system that has experienced an unprecedented explosion of renewable generation, puts the Executive on the ropes. Numerous experts pointed out that a greater contribution from nuclear production would have helped stabilize the system after the unforeseen event that caused the loss of 15 gigawatts of capacity in just five seconds. But Sánchez categorically denied this claim and proclaimed that far from being part of the solution, they would have been a burden on restoring supply because part of the available electricity had to be diverted to cooling their cores. This is a biased view of what happened, as it concealed the fact that some of these facilities were shut down at the time of the sudden collapse of the electrical system, at the express direction of the sole manager. This sectarianism will not help us learn the lessons of this crisis and take measures to prevent it from happening again.