EU's Ribera urges against hasty conclusions on Iberia blackout

BARCELONA (Reuters) -Europe will draw lessons from last week's blackout in Spain and Portugal on the need for power storage and investment in grids, European Commission Vice President Teresa Ribera said on Monday, while advising against hasty conclusions on its cause.

The blackout raised questions over the challenges power grids face from the growth of solar and wind power whose supply can be intermittent.

Analysts and industry officials said there was not enough stable power, such as gas and nuclear, available to provide back up when the outage happened.

"It's a bit surprising (to see) the trigger-happy attitude" the blackout engendered in some quarters, Ribera told an event in Barcelona, referring to those who immediately blamed renewable energy for the outage.

She said it was important to understand first what happened last Monday as authorities seek to analyse a vast amount of data from the grid operator and power companies.

Large-capacity batteries and other means of storing energy, such as pumped storage hydropower, help to mitigate the risk of outages in the electrical systems, and Europe will need to evaluate how to better use these, Ribera said.

She also pointed to the need to increase inter-state grid connections, such as those between Spain and France.

Spain's grid operator REE last week narrowed down the source of the outage to two separate incidents of loss of generation in substations in southwestern Spain, but says it has yet to identify their exact location.

Energy Minister Sara Aagesen said earlier on Monday the grid had initially withstood a power generation outage in southern Spain 19 seconds before the blackout, and that the system was only crashed by the two subsequent incidents, with the loss of generation in the southwest.

(Reporting by Peitro Lombardi and Inti Landauro, editing by Andrei Khalip and Barbara Lewis)