Spanish gas demand for electricity production jumped by nearly 37% between January and September, as Spain relied on more gas-fired power generation to keep the grid stable after Europe’s worst blackout in modern history.
In late April, the worst blackout Europe has ever seen in modern times, when Spain and Portugal were left without electricity for hours, was a wake-up call for the EU – and the rest of the world – that regardless of booming renewable energy capacity installations, power supply will not be secure unless grids are capable and flexible enough to accommodate clean energy and meet rising demand.
As a result of the outage, the share of combined-cycle generation jumped by 36.8% in the first nine months of 2025 compared to a year earlier, as gas served “as a reinforcement to the security of electricity supply,” Spain’s gas grid operator Enagas said on Tuesday in its results for January to September.
Spain’s total demand for natural gas and exports stood at 267.6 terrawatts (TWh) during the first nine months of 2025, up by 6.6% from a year earlier, Enagas said.
Spain also boosted gas exports, driven by higher deliveries to France to help fill the French underground storage facilities and carry out maintenance at its regasification terminals.
Earlier this month, an expert panel of the European network of electricity transmission system operators, ENTSO-E, released its report on the April blackout in Spain and Portugal.
The report highlighted “the exceptional and unprecedented nature of this incident – the first time a cascading series of disconnections of generation components along with voltage increases has been part of the sequence of events leading to a blackout in the Continental Europe Synchronous Area.”
In short, the report said that excessive voltage was the driver behind the blackout. A final report is due out in the first quarter of 2026, and will present the findings from investigations into the root causes for the outage.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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