European Commissioner says “there is no reason to blame blackout on renewables”
Following on from today’s remarks by president of the European Council António Costa, the European Commissioner for Energy has also rejected attributing last week’s power cut across the Iberian Peninsula to an excess of renewable energy production, taking care to praise Portuguese and Spanish authorities’ response to the “worst blackout in decades.”
“There is no reason to believe that (the blackout) was due to renewable energies,” EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen told a press conference on the sidelines of the European Parliament plenary session in Strasbourg.
On the day that the European Commission proposed a roadmap for the EU to phase out Russian energy imports, Jørgensen said (by way of explanation) that “we can point to many countries with a very high level of renewables in their energy mix that have far fewer blackout minutes per year than other countries that don’t.”
The European commissioner took the moment to “praise how the authorities in Spain and Portugal dealt with this crisis” – something that may raise a smile in Portugal where political parties accused the government of not dealing at all efficiently with the drama.
According to Jørgensen, last Monday’s was “the worst blackout in decades, and a very difficult situation.”
It is still “too early” to determine the cause of the incident, albeit the European Commission “is following all this very closely and is also ready to help with experts”.
“We are, of course, waiting for the conclusions (of the various investigations), and we also expect some recommendations. If there is anything we can do at the European level to prevent this from happening again, (…) then we are ready to help,” he concluded.
It could be argued that on the day the bloc is proposing to phase out fossil fuel imports it would not be politic to concede to frailties of systems powered only by renewables. But for now, Brussels’ mantra is being widely pushed: there can be no right (or left) turns, renewables are the way to go. ND
Source material: LUSA
