Spain suffered several power glitches and industry officials sounded repeated warnings about the instability of its power grid in the build up to its catastrophic blackout on Monday.
The government has ordered several investigations into the blackout. Industry experts say that whatever the cause, the mass outage and earlier smaller incidents indicate the Spanish power grid faces challenges amid the boom of renewables.
A surplus of energy supply can disrupt power grids in the same way as a deficit, and grid operators must maintain balance.
France already has bidirectional power lines to trade electricity with Spain.
They were used to rapidly restore power in northern Spain after the outage and that interconnection actually caused a very short blackout in southwestern France.
The infrastructure France thankfully refused to allow is fossil gas lines, saving Europe decades of gas usage to justify the investment.
From what I’ve heard on TV around here (Portugal), France still refuses to allow electrical lines passing through French territory from Spain and Portugal to sell power directly to the rest of the EU.
France is fine with buying themselves power from Portugal and Spain on the cheap to resell for more money to the rest of the EU or with selling power themselves to Spain and Portugal. Spain and Portugal have very good conditions for renewables, especially solar (for example, Portugal has twice the amount of peak sun exposure hours per year than Germany), so it makes sense to produce that kind of renewables here (on the other hand, things like hydro - which is still most of Portugal’s renewable energy generation - make a lot less sense since both countries are predicted to become much drier with global warming)
There are some crazy ideas to bypass France with a submarine cable in the Mediterranean Sea, but those are quite complex and costly.
I’ve also heard about the gas thing and the plan was to import gas from Northern Africa via Spain and sell it to the rest of Europe, as neither Spain nor Portugal produce gas. This would serve to reduce the dependency of, earlier, Russia gas and nowadays LPG from places like the US. That said I agree that we (Europe) need to wean ourselves of fossil fuels.