The energy transition is getting strained – and that’s when things break

It’s been nearly two weeks since Spain’s national grid faltered - plunging parts of the Iberian Peninsula into chaos and dragging Portugal with it. The initial response, as ever, was to look for someone to blame. Hackers? Foreign powers? But there was no hostile actor behind the failure. This was a system buckling under the strain of its own transition.

It’s a stark reminder: as we rush to decarbonise, the energy transition is becoming increasingly stretched - and under strain is when things break.

Since that incident, the headlines have kept coming. Just last week, Drax announced it was pausing the long-anticipated expansion of its hydroelectric site at Ben Cruachan in Argyll, citing uncertainty around government support. Around the same time, Ørsted confirmed it would shelve a major phase of its Hornsea offshore wind development. Both projects would have provided exactly the kind of clean, flexible power we need to replace fossil fuels and stabilise the grid.

Yet while critical infrastructure is being mothballed, the pressure on the grid is only growing. In recent days, the Scottish National Investment Bank confirmed it will lend £600 million to ScottishPower to upgrade connections between Scotland and England - an overdue investment to enable large-scale power movement across the UK. That’s welcome news, and a sign that we’re finally starting to address one of the key weaknesses exposed by events in Spain: the ability to move energy quickly and reliably to where it’s needed most. But these contradictions - progress in one area, stalling in another - are what make this transition so precarious. We are adding renewables rapidly, but not always with the supporting storage or network infrastructure in place. When the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine, we fall back on an increasingly thin safety net.

I’ve worked in the roofing and renewables sector for over 30 years, and the last 14 at the intersection of solar and battery storage. I’ve long believed that storage - both fast-responding systems like lithium-ion batteries and long-duration solutions like pumped hydro - is the missing link in our energy future. Events like the Iberian blackout only strengthens that view. Spain’s grid collapsed because of a sudden shortfall in renewable generation and a lack of flexibility to compensate. It wasn’t a cyberattack, or extreme weather. It was a foreseeable result of ambition not matched by resilience. Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, has promised it won’t happen again and that it won’t diminish the country’s commitment to renewable energy. But with major projects being put on pause across Europe, can we really be confident?

Closer to home, the irony is that Scotland already hosts nine of the UK’s eleven proposed pumped hydro sites - proven infrastructure that could play a central role in balancing our grid. Yet none are under construction. The case for pumped storage is overwhelming, but progress is slow. Market frameworks haven’t caught up. And while policymakers debate, investment is hesitating.

At the other end of the scale, we’re seeing farmers, landowners and businesses across Scotland installing solar and battery storage systems - not just to cut costs, but to take control of their energy futures, while contributing to ours. The question we should all be asking is: what will this uncertainty do to energy prices? For households and businesses alike, volatility is the enemy - and without a stable, well-integrated system behind our net zero ambitions, we risk more than just blackouts. We risk public confidence.

The energy transition isn’t just a matter of replacing coal with solar or wind. It’s a wholesale redesign of how we produce, store, move and use energy. That’s a complex process - and it’s one we need to get right.

Because if Spain was a warning, the question is not whether it could happen here. It’s whether we’ll be ready when it does.

John Forster, Chair and Founder, Forster Group