[Opinion article] “The system’s resilience in the face of a new blackout”

RD 88/2026 opens the door to the independent aggregator, but the resilience of the system is at stake on two fronts: hybridizing the renewable parks already installed and multiplying the storage behind the industrial meter.

Opinion article by Iván Olivares, CEO of Vector Energy. Published in the magazine “Energy” n.152 from El Economista, April 30, 2026.

One year has passed since the Iberian blackout of April 28, 2025. The public debate remains anchored in two axes: more firm generation and more transport network. These are legitimate discussions, but they bypass the diagnosis. What broke that Monday was not only the ability to generate or transport electrons; it was the ability to store and respond in milliseconds when the system lost synchronization. And that ability, combined with more than 65% % renewable energy and increasingly saturated radial power plants, cannot continue resting on a handful of synchronous power plants and on the interconnections with France.

Spain has done the homework in renewable energy: we closed 2025 with over 45 GW of solar and 32 GW of wind installed. The problem is that we have built generation without the counterpart of storage that makes it manageable. The result is two dysfunctions: renewable energy dumped at zero euros at noon —over 3 TWh in 2025 according to sectorial estimates— and gaps at dusk that are covered by expensive gas. The cost of technical constraints exceeded 1.4 billion euros last year. It is a tax that the consumer pays for not deploying storage at the pace of generation.

Hybridizing the already installed renewable park

The first and most urgent front is to add BESS to existing solar and wind farms. We are talking about already built assets, with their connection point and permits: co-locating a battery leverages sunk infrastructure and transforms an intermittent generator into a partially dispatchable resource. The reasonable ratio for peninsular photovoltaics is 1 MW/2 MWh for every 4-5 MWp installed. This allows for shifting production to peak hours — where the price can multiply by five—, reducing waste, and capturing revenue from adjustment services.

The economy has ceased to be an obstacle. The price of LFP modules has fallen by 40% % in two years and is now below €120/kWh at the system level. With the average arbitration of the Spanish pool in 2025 and the expected revenues from secondary and tertiary sectors, the payback of hybridization ranges between 5-7 years. What continues to slow down deployment are administrative delays and a lack of regulatory clarity on how to treat hybrid access: two frictions that have been pending resolution for three years and cannot continue to be there.

Storage behind the industrial counter

The second front is distributed storage in industrial clients: batteries between 200 kW and 5 MW installed behind the meter at factories, industrial estates and logistics centers. Spain has more than 28,000 industrial supplies with a power of more than 450 kW. Each of them is a potential node of flexibility that the system does not reach today.

In March, Royal Decree 88/2026 was published, which transposes the figure of the independent aggregator and unlocks the participation of distributed resources in the adjustment markets. Now, a 1 MW battery in an industrial plant can—without the marketer being the mandatory intermediary—offer secondary, tertiary, and fast frequency response. If only 5% % of the Spanish industrial park installs its own storage, we are talking about an additional 3-5 GW of dispatchable capacity, connected at low and medium voltage, with response times of less than 500 milliseconds.

Three functions that no combined cycle can replicate

Both fronts —utility-scale hybridization and BESS behind the meter— bring three capabilities to the system that are currently under-supplied. First, frequency response: a lithium battery responds in tens of milliseconds, two orders of magnitude faster than conventional synchronous inertia. In a system with fewer turbines spinning, that speed is not a luxury: it’s the difference between a recoverable voltage gap and zero. Second, island start-up and recharge: thousands of nodes capable of operating independently for hours accelerate the recovery from days to hours. Third, local congestion relief: absorbing surpluses where they are today and delivering them hours later alleviates the grid without the need for new lines that take a decade to build.

The regulator has complied; it is time to execute

RD 88/2026 resolves the regulatory part of the distributed resource. The price of the batteries does the rest. What is still missing is execution capacity: qualified electrical engineering, integrators who understand both the client side and the grid side, and an industrial chain capable of sustaining operation and maintenance for fifteen years. As a Spanish manufacturer of inverters and BESS, we see this every week: projects with quotes ranging from 60 % between suppliers and deadlines between six and eighteen months. The market needs to consolidate around actors with real industrial capacity and local commitment.

Three things should happen before the next 28A. First, that Red Eléctrica and the CNMC publish the technical requirements and guarantees required of the independent aggregator — without operational rules, RD 88/2026 remains in place. Second, the procedures for hybridization with clear criteria and short deadlines be unlocked; the largest deployment of BESS at zero incremental cost to the grid is there. Third, large industrial companies incorporate storage into their investment plans, as they did with photovoltaic power five years ago.

The blackout cost between 400 and 800 million euros in direct losses. Investing a portion of that figure in storage —hybridized in the renewable park and distributed behind the meter— is literally profitable. A year later, the question is not whether Spain needs more storage capacity; it’s how much longer we can afford not to do it.

Ivan Olivares, CEO of Vector Energy