Monday, April 28, 2025

Europe Asking ‘Who Turned the Lights Out?!’ – HotAir

April 28, 2025
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Europe Asking 'Who Turned the Lights Out?!' – HotAir
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For some reason, this morning, sixty million people across all of the Iberian Peninsula and a good chunk of France had no power.

I mean, BOOM BOOM – OUT WENT THE LIGHTS





Normally chaotic city streets, death traps in the best of times with working traffic signals, became the driving thrill of a lifetime.

It might have been a blessing to be stuck in a traffic jam instead of navigating intersections and crosswalks.

Urban transportation-dependent residents, so used to hopping on the electric commuter trains to get from point A to point B, were plunged into confusion by the sudden, screeching halt to rail movement…

…and ticket purchases. Also, long queues at ATMs because credit card readers don’t work without electricity, and, hello.

Neither do ATMs.

I’m not saying to carry a Kristi Noem-sized wad with you, but having a couple of bucks on hand is always prudent for emergencies.





Night’s falling now, very little power has been restored, and one of the providers is saying it may take ‘weeks’ to get it all back up for everyone.

At the moment, they’re trying to blame a ‘rare atmospheric phenomenon’ for the devastating burp out, as if the storm of the century appeared out of nowhere or SMOD came hurtling in from space unexpectedly. Utility authorities claim it was related to variations in temperature, suggesting massive fluctuations.

That’s going to be a tough sell to all but the truest climate cultists.

Seems like it’s been really nice.

No wonder everyone goes to Spain in the Spring.





This might just be a tiny government fib to hide the embarrassment. You see, it was only two weeks ago that this very same country was tooting its horn about achieving the first day ever in history when Spain was powered completely by renewables.

GO GREEN!

The problem with Spain’s rush to renewables is that they cut their throats for backup if anything ever went south. 

Because, of course, they did.

Spain has less than 14% backup power generation in case something goes awry. According to the energy charts, they were running on 78% renewables when everything shut down, and I mean everything.

The operators had to do an emergency disconnect from the European grid. A system heavy on renewables is already more vulnerable to failures, and then it doesn’t have enough juice on its own to restart.

…Spain’s national grid operator, Red Eléctrica, revealed that the immediate cause of the blackout was a “very strong oscillation in the electrical network” that forced Spain’s grid to disconnect from the broader European system, leading to the collapse of the Iberian Peninsula’s power supply at 12:38 p.m.

“No one has ever attempted a black start on a grid that relies so heavily on renewables as Iberia,” noted one energy analyst on X. “The limited number of thermal generators will make it more challenging to re-establish momentum and frequency control.”

In a traditional power grid dominated by heavy spinning machines — coal plants, gas turbines, nuclear reactors — small disturbances, even from severe weather, are absorbed and smoothed out by the sheer physical inertia of the system. The heavy rotating mass of the generators acts like a shock absorber, resisting rapid changes in frequency and stabilizing the grid.

But in an electricity system dominated by solar panels, wind turbines, and inverters, there is almost no physical inertia. Solar panels produce no mechanical rotation. Most modern wind turbines are electronically decoupled from the grid and provide little stabilizing force. Inverter-based systems, which dominate modern renewable energy grids, are precise but delicate. They follow the frequency of the grid rather than resisting sudden changes.





When the oscillations in the grid began, there was no inertia in the system to help them shake out, so they shook the grid apart.

…Five minutes before the blackout, at 12:30 p.m. local time, Spain’s electricity grid was running under highly unusual and dangerous conditions. Solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, and wind power together supplied about 78 percent of all generation. Nuclear provided about 11.5 percent. Co-generation, mostly industrial waste heat plants, added another 5 percent. Gas-fired plants contributed just about 3 percent — less than one gigawatt across the entire grid.

This meant that almost no dispatchable, spinning generation was online. No heavy turbines. No stabilizing momentum. Almost no inertia, the physical property that resists sudden changes in motion, and which has stabilized electrical grids for over 100 years.

As a result, when the disturbance hit at around 12:35 p.m., the system had nothing to resist it. The grid’s frequency, essentially the heartbeat of the system, instantly plunged. The disturbance didn’t just affect Spain. Grid frequency drops were registered across continental Europe.

This wasn’t just a Spanish blackout. It shook the entire European grid.

They’ve been warning about the dangers of max solar/wind grids – and seeing the results of ignoring the warnings – for years. Spain did nothing to balance its rise in renewable dependence with replacing the loss of inertia from traditional sources.

…In 2022, a team of researchers modeled the Spanish grid with large use of wind and solar and warned that, without significant investments in flexibility and inertia-providing technologies, the grid’s stability would be at risk. The authors show that as coal, nuclear, and combined-cycle plants are phased out, curtailment of wind and solar will rise dramatically, and grid inertia would fall, increasing the likelihood of frequency instability. They concluded that to maintain reliability alongside decarbonization goals, Spain must build substantial new sources of synthetic inertia, backup generation, and grid flexibility .

Other countries were seeing the same risks play out in real time. After a massive blackout in South Australia in September 2016, where a combination of high renewable penetration and a major storm led to a grid collapse, Australian investigators concluded that the lack of inertia was a key reason the system could not recover.





All the available funds were plowed into the blossoming renewables marketplace, and none of it went to required redundancy or infrastructure.

…The outage was triggered by a dramatic drop of more than 10 GW in electricity supply, linked directly to the unpredictable nature of renewables. Wind speeds fluctuated significantly on April 28, dropping generation capacity sharply just as demand surged midday. Unlike coal, gas, or nuclear plants, which reliably supply power irrespective of weather, renewable sources faltered exactly when they were most needed.

Spain’s grid operator, Red Eléctrica, acknowledged that limited interconnections and insufficient battery storage severely hampered emergency responses. With a mere 5% interconnection capacity compared to the recommended 15%, Spain and Portugal were isolated precisely when stability mattered most.

Detailed analysis reveals this blackout wasn’t an isolated incident… it’s a predictable consequence of hastily transitioning away from stable, fossil-based sources without adequate planning or infrastructure investment. Studies consistently show that power outages significantly increase mortality rates, especially among vulnerable groups. According to public health officials, prolonged outages correlate with heightened death rates from medical device failures, extreme heat or cold exposure, and interruptions in essential medical services.

Ironically, climate change, has never directly caused such widespread and immediate life-threatening outages. Yet the “solutions” policymakers advocate, rapid renewable expansion without proper safeguards, are now demonstrably dangerous.





This is what the Bidens, Newsoms, Healys, Harris, and all the dystopian cultists here in the States want for us and would have forcibly imposed on the country as a whole.

This is a system that not only destroys our standard of living through its exorbitant costs, but also its inherent unreliability, not to mention the environmental costs.

Toss in the vulnerability to hacking or sabotage or simple weather-related destruction…

…and no one ever in their right mind would choose renewables over nuclear or natural gas.

‘Right mind’ being the operative phrase, not power-hungry Malthusians and grifters.

‘Right minds’ rejected it all here on November 5th.

Good luck getting the lights back on and the Socialists in Spain up to snuff, though.







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