BeClever, May 2025

Welcome to the May edition of BeClever, Clevergy's energy newsletter! As we do every month, we bring you the latest from the energy sector. This month we tell you about an energy podcast that is going to be well worth a listen and what we have learned from the blackout at the end of April.

Energéticamente, a podcast that talks about energy

Earlier this year we thought it would be a good idea to make a podcast to talk about energy, at a pivotal moment for the sector. We are living through a hugely important period of transformation in which technology plays a key role, and where everything is changing in generation, distribution, self-consumption… and also in the products and services that users demand from utilities. On top of that, in our day-to-day work we are in touch with the protagonists of this change, with top-tier professionals from the best utilities, installers, associations and institutions. That is why we thought it was a great idea to talk about our world, energy, and that is how Energéticamente was born.

Energéticamente is a video podcast in which we are going to talk about, yes, energy. With experts, innovators and leaders from the sector, sharing their experience and their vision from different angles. In the first episode, which we premiered last week, our guest was Jorge González Cortés, vice-president of Contigo Energía. Do not miss the upcoming episodes! It is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcast, and iVoox, so you can watch or listen to it wherever and whenever you like.

Understanding the blackout of 28 April

At the end of last month Spain suffered an unprecedented blackout, which also dragged in Portugal. On the one hand it caught us all by surprise, because our power grid had operated without failures for decades, although we were also aware of the risks of a system that until not so long ago ran on a completely different generation mix.

We explained it in an article by our CPO, Álvaro Pérez Bello (The electric domino: anatomy of a national collapse in the age of renewables), which had quite an impact. We even appeared on TV.

The blackout has made it clear that we need to improve our infrastructure and our interconnections with Europe. Because the problem is not just Spain, it affects the whole of Europe. We are talking about a complex structure. *“The largest machine that humankind has ever created is the European electricity system, which runs from Spain's interconnection with Morocco all the way to the interconnection with Ukraine, which has recently joined the European electricity system. Millions of cables that give meaning to all of modernity, because energy moves the world.”* said Jorge González Cortés on Energéticamente.

What have we learned from the blackout?

Many things. We already knew that Spain had a significant deficit in energy storage, but now we know just how important it is. Our country ended 2024 with 3.3GW of storage, a long way from the 22GW set out by the PNIEC for 2030.

Beyond strengthening energy storage, we have understood the importance of grid forming and synthetic inertia when it comes to generating synchrony to make better use of renewables, and as a perfect and necessary complement to storage.

The interconnections between European Union countries are also very important, especially for the Iberian Peninsula, as we have seen. This would allow us to increase the stability of the system and also to make better use of energy surpluses, and to benefit from demand flexibility.

At the residential level, users of photovoltaic panels experienced a certain amount of frustration on realising or discovering that their installations did not work during the blackout. But it has also sparked enormous interest in upgrading their installations with backup and storage systems.

Other news from the sector

• Renewable energy generated less electricity this April than in April last year
• The “España Verde y Conectada” alliance is born to boost access to power grids and lead the energy transition
• China is turning its rooftops into power stations. It has achieved in three months what takes three years in Europe