© Borja Sánchez-Trillo / EFE
With the big blackout of 28 April, Spaniards had a Monday in the sun, using the title of a film that described the drama of unemployment as resigned idleness. The interruption of activity, transport, and even telecommunications awakened us to the fragility of the technical structures that sustain our electric life, while the civic behavior of the population showed the resilience of our social organization. During the month of May, the reactions of both the Government and the opposition – more inclined to playing the blame game than to sitting down to analyze the flaws and dysfunctions of the system, with statements as inane as “we don’t know what happened, but it won’t happen again” – brought to mind the sterile reproaches tossed back and forth amid the catastrophe of the Valencia flash floods, and brought to light the deterioration of our political climate. Blinded by the polarized atmosphere and bereft of intellectual or ethical benchmarks, we are faced with an extraordinarily unstable and uncertain geopolitical environment, having failed to reach a rational consensus on the big questions that determine our collective future, from the demographic collapse or the migratory flows to the economic model or the supply of electricity.
In the energy field, the stands taken on renewable sources, fossil fuels, or nuclear power plants have been more ideological than pragmatic, and both the pace of decarbonization and the risks associated with the process – dramatically laid bare by the blackout – have been addressed from dogmatic trenches that hinder a debate made urgent by the world’s convulsions. We face the fracture of the system of trade regulations and diplomacy in force until now, the rise everywhere of authoritarian populisms, and the growing danger that the current military conflicts will intensify and expand. And when prosperity, freedom, and peace are no longer guaranteed, it becomes an urgent matter to work out a consensus on the best way to supply power to businesses, transport networks, and homes, because it is not easy to have energy that is clean, safe, and affordable all at once, and decisions have got to be made that have a bearing on our economic and political institutions as well as on our international alignments.
The power failure has affected potential investment in renewables, induced prospects of prolonging the useful life of nuclear plants, and reactivated projects to improve the distribution networks and storage capacities required by our energy mix, where wind and solar farms play an important part. But the accident has also drawn attention to the essential role of hydroelectric power plants, with their efficient use of water pumped into higher reservoirs as an energy-accumulation method that dispenses with batteries, or that of thermal power stations with combined cycles, despite their dependence on gas, a cause of multiple geopolitical uncertainties. Add to all this the proliferation of data centers, a consequence of the boom of artificial intelligence, which is fast increasing an energy demand that has already reached 500 TWh in the world and around 6 TWh in Spain; a figure sure to keep rising significantly – up to 12 TWh in 2030 and to 26 TWh in 2050 – with the numerous facilities going up. Our electric life is not cheap, nor, alas, always safe.
