The third vice-president and minister for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, Sara Aagesen, defended that it would be “a good exercise in transparency” for the companies involved to make all the information they have available about the power outage of April 28, 2025.
During his/her intervention in the Senate's investigation commission on electrical zero, he/she recalled that the Executive had already demanded at the time the dissemination of those data, but did not obtain the approval of the companies, “except for one, from Red Eléctrica de España (REE)”, he/she said.
For this reason, he reiterated on several occasions his call to companies to allow those details to be known. “I take the opportunity again in this Chamber to say that, almost a year later, it would be very interesting if companies, which are owners of their own information, would make it public,” he stated before the senators.
In parallel, the president of the Commission, Senator of the Popular Party Francisco Javier Márquez, announced that the audios corresponding to the day of the blackout have already arrived at the Upper House, sent by the companies themselves, so that they can be listened to by the members of the Senate Commission.
Aagesen stressed that the Executive "had no warning, alert or signal" that would allow anticipating that on April 28 an electrical failure of that magnitude would occur and remarked that on that date the necessary regulatory and normative instruments already existed to have avoided the incident.
The minister reiterated that the Government "had no prior knowledge" that would have made the event foreseeable and maintained that renewable energies were in no way responsible for what happened.
Technical reports and mechanisms of prevention
Next, he stressed that the three reports prepared on the blackout —that of the Government's Investigation Committee and the two released last week by the National Commission for Markets and Competition (CNMC) and by the panel of European experts from Entso-E— agree that “the regulation, the rules, and the sufficient mechanisms did exist for what happened on April 28 to have been avoided”.
It also highlighted that the European expert panel's own document insists on that idea and considers that, with the generation groups available at that time, “the tension could have been controlled.”
“From a technical rigor perspective, I want to answer what three reports already endorse, and there are three, I would like to highlight that. The committee's report, which we carried out in forty-nine days, and, eleven months later, the Entso-E report and the CNMC report. The event that occurred on the 28th was unprecedented, unpredictable”, he added in response to questions from popular senator Miguel Ángel Castellón.
In the same vein, he/she/it remarked that “with the existing regulatory and normative elements and with the existing mechanisms, what happened should not have happened.”
Without accusations to companies and without attributed responsibilities
On the other hand, the minister avoided commenting when she was questioned about the words that the president of Redeia, Beatriz Corredor, uttered in September in the Senate about a possible “experiment” in the management of a photovoltaic plant. Aagesen claimed “to have no information on the matter” and remarked that none of the reports prepared to date “points to any company.”
“Neither the Committee's report, nor the Entso-E report, nor the CNMC report, identify responsibilities. The report identifies the causes, and I remind you that what it says is either due to a lack of programming of sufficient voltage control capacity, or because the groups were not doing it as expected, or a combination of both were part of the cause,” he stressed, refusing to issue political or personal assessments.
In this context, he defended that the procedures must be guaranteeing, in such a way that they can follow their administrative and judicial course with all the guarantees, and specified that, to achieve it, “it is precisely important not to identify responsibilities”.