Talk about a demonstration project for the green energy transition. On April 28, while we were in Senegal investigating efforts by rich Western technologically-advanced countries to force poor non-Western countries to forgo reliable, affordable hydrocarbon energy at the risk of going or staying dark, Spain and Portugal went dark. The usual suspects were mystified; the New York Times rushed to print with “The cause of the outage was unclear.” But it is reasonable to treat it as a demonstration project (and Net Zero Watch duly warned Britons that they might be next) since, Heatmap noted, “Portugal has in the past gone several days in a row generating 100% of its power from renewables; Spain, meanwhile, was boasting of its 100% renewable generation just weeks before the blackout.” And if it can happen even in fairly wealthy countries, those struggling to escape poverty would surely be well-advised to avoid it. As Tony Heller posted acerbically, next to a satellite image of Spain in North Korean/rural African darkness, “Spain achieves #NetZero ahead of schedule.” And it’s not a good look.

In reporting the event, Euronews quoted Spain’s prime minister that such a thing was “unthinkable”. Yes, and their inability to think it would happen seems to be the problem. In the real world it wasn’t just thinkable, it really happened.

The Manhattan Contrarian weighed in with a warning that:

“For years, many in the climate skeptic community have warned that expansion of intermittent renewable electricity generation on the grid will, sooner or later, lead to frequent blackouts. The reason for the warning is easy to understand: The grid has some rather exacting operational requirements that the intermittent renewable generation technologies cannot fulfill. Primary among these requirements are, first, minute-by-minute matching of electricity supply with electricity demand and, second, grid-wide synchronization of the frequency of the alternating current. When wind and solar provided relatively small portions of the electricity consumed, other generation sources, particularly thermal (fossil fuel) and hydro, would fulfill these requirements. But as wind and solar come to dominate generation, the problems become much more difficult to solve.”

He then said that as he is not a grid engineer he normally steers clear of such things, a kind of humility that does not seem to slow down most climate alarmists, before writing:

“As of this writing, it does not appear that a definitive cause (or causes) of today’s blackouts has been established. However, there is every reason to think that the increasing penetration of wind and solar generation in Spain is the most important part of the problem.”

And he then provided links to articles delving into the intricacies of a “very strong oscillation” in the Spanish network that it could not handle. As for whether worse things will come soon, he said:

“I’m not going to pretend I know. But I do know that the electricity system in most of Europe and many U.S. states is in the hands of crazed fanatics who have no idea what they are doing. My own bet would be that there are many far worse blackouts to come, until this idiotic ‘net zero’ thing is abandoned.”

Naturally the same authorities who failed to foresee or prevent it quickly declared that with them on the job, a recurrence was, uh, as unthinkable as the original event had been. Another Euronews item quoted Beatriz Corredor, the president of Red Eléctrica, the Spanish national grid, that it wasn’t her company’s fault and “won’t happen again”. Though how she can promise to prevent the next one while shrugging off responsibility for this one is unclear. Except of course that it’s how modern politicians and bureaucrats talk; thus Ms. Corredor told the press the blackout had nothing to do with renewables, heck no, and that Spain’s electric system was the “best and most resilient in Europe.” (Apart from the bit where it shut down.) Don’t show us the worst.

In fact she was essentially lying. As Michael Shellenberger retorted, the country’s prime minister brushed off any connection to Spain’s green energy transition and repeated his opposition to nuclear power, calling it “far from being a solution.” But, Shellenberger went on:

“the underlying cause of the blackout was the lack of ‘inertia,’ the physical buffer provided by traditional power plants that use heavy spinning machinery to stabilize the grid during sudden fluctuations. Our electrical systems are based on power plants that rotate massive metal shafts at thousands of revolutions per minute, creating electricity while also providing momentum. That rotational mass acts like a shock absorber, automatically resisting sharp swings in supply and demand. When a fault or sudden drop hits the system, that inertia buys precious seconds for control systems to respond and for operators to isolate the problem. In contrast, solar panels and most modern wind turbines rely on inverters, which lack physical mass and can’t cushion these shocks.”

It might be unfair to ask the climate zealot in your family or workplace to explain this issue. But grid managers can reasonably be expected to know about it. (And as Roger Pielke Jr. noted, many have; but if they told the politicians the latter either didn’t listen or didn’t understand or didn’t care.) And zealots they are, including the weird insistence that Spain must shut down the nuclear energy that, in addition to being low-carbon, still generates more electricity for them than wind and solar and delivers crucial stability that, clearly, the hasty push for trendy power-like sources is undermining.

For as Shellenberger also said:

“On the day of the blackout, nearly 80 percent of Spain’s electricity came from inverter-based solar and wind sources... With so few conventional plants online, the grid had virtually no buffer to absorb even a minor shock. When the disturbance hit, the frequency plunged and the system unraveled within seconds. Unlike older grids built around rotating mass, Spain’s modern, ultra-light grid simply had no way to withstand the sudden imbalance. And Spain’s electrical grid operator admitted on a conference call yesterday that it was a ‘massive’ loss of renewable energy generation that triggered the blackout and said that it was ‘very likely’ the initial disturbance came from solar.”

Other than that, nothing to do with renewables. Nothing to see here, folks. And no way to see it with the lights off. As Robert Bryce put it:

“Big media outlets are also in denial. On Wednesday, Reuters published an article that claimed while ‘it may be tempting’ to pin the blackout on wind and solar, ‘Reliance on renewables is not to blame. Rather, the issue appears to be the management of renewables in the modern grid.’ Right. So renewables aren’t to blame, but it’s the grid’s fault?”

Indeed they do; as the lights were coming back on the Globe & Mail said “the outage’s cause remains a mystery” in an article that didn’t contain the words “solar”, “wind”, “alternative” or “renewable”. And the Guardian wrote that “The outage, blamed by operators on temperature variations, left tens of millions without electricity” while insisting that “no firm cause for the shutdown has yet emerged.” Also avoiding any use of “solar”, “wind”, “alternative” or “renewable”.

To its credit Heatmap, not being a politician or a big media outlet, conceded that “Spain’s Blackout Has Put in Motion a Debate Over Inertia/ Spinning turbines have it, but solar panels don’t.” Better late than never.

The Times also said that:

“The reaction across the region ranged from frantic stockpiling to confused bewilderment to calmly hunkering down and making do with old-fashioned electricity-free ways of living.”

But this fatuity overlooked the obvious point that “making do with old-fashioned electricity-free ways of living” for a couple of hours can be fun, even romantic, unless your life depends on electricity. Euronews did note that within hours there were reports of fatalities. But the big point is that if it lasts more than a day or two, life becomes very difficult. And for hundreds of millions of people in the world, the power is always off while for hundreds of millions more it’s unreliable, and it’s no fun at all.