At 12:33 pm on Monday, a total blackout hit Iberia and bits of southern France and soon became Spain’s worst power outage ever, leaving fifty-five million people in the dark for twelve excruciating hours. Even for emergency rooms running on generators for critical medical work, electricity and phone signal still hadn’t fully returned by midnight. Aside from major road, train, and air-traffic chaos, panic and mischief were limited to the odd supermarket hoarders and marauders on pitch-dark streets. Though fatalities from the blackout remain few, Spaniards are shaken. After such a stint in first-world state failure, it’s clear they will grow upset if the ongoing fact-finding efforts yield lessons that go unlearnt.
But the government so far has ducked out of giving basic answers about what went wrong, let alone answers that reckon with Spain’s energy mix—one of the greenest in Europe, making its power grid woefully weak. Most likely, official inquiries will eventually show that Spain’s misguided energy policies caused or at least contributed to the catastrophe. In the meantime, Western leaders should waste no time drawing lessons from this non-fatal disaster in Spain before the underlying errors beget worse consequences elsewhere. This applies to the European Union (EU), whose net-zero ambitions under the European Green Deal share part of the blame, even as wartime, multipolar competition has lately prompted Brussels into a timid rethink. But it concerns as much Joe Biden’s green-protectionist legacy, which risks being inherited intact by Trump’s Democratic successor—putting America’s left-liberal party on track to surpass even the EU in green zealotry.
Among the flurry of inquiries to follow, Spain’s left-wing government has ordered its own probe, which may prove more about PR and damage control than aiding accountability. Portugal, meanwhile—fed by the same interconnected grid—has requested a more independent inquiry from the EU. Hopefully, other investigators outside Europe will cast a disinterested look into the affair. Yet a consensus among experts has already formed that green policies are at least partly to blame, and Spain’s otherwise loud green lobby is now conspicuously silent. The grid’s unprecedented halt merely revealed years-old, in-built weaknesses that went covered and deflected by authorities as Spain’s “energy transition” progressed. These weaknesses are unmistakably rooted in a reckless bet on solar and wind from the early 2000s, to the gradual exclusion of nuclear power.
Spain’s blackout came at a time when its grid has been running on somewhere between 70 percent and 75 percent of input from renewables—an all-time high. The country’s Keynesian response to the 2008 crash saw solar panels deployed ubiquitously on empty expanses, and their private installment in homes lavishly subsidized—a policy rush that culminated in solar feeding 55 percent of the grid’s power input on Monday morning, with wind contributing 11 percent. As asynchronous sources, the amount of energy these panels and turbines produce can’t be controlled on short notice—to say nothing of their unpredictable flow of year-long generation—leading to Monday’s unexpected, blackout-inducing “surge” of solar energy.
The more reliable—so-called “synchronous”—sources, meanwhile, could have helped avoid wild fluctuations in energy output, and they are plenty reliable throughout seasons and climates. Yet the Spanish green lobby’s relentless campaign against nuclear energy and hydroelectric dams didn’t allow the option. After closing two nuclear reactor plants, a plan to phase out Spain’s five remaining ones is slated for completion in 2027, while the ones working on Monday did so at half-capacity, feeding only 10 percent of power to the grid. Last October, a severe cold drop in Valencia that left over 220 fatalities had shown the risks of caving to the green lobby’s demands to take out the solid hydrological infrastructure in which Spain once excelled. Yet the ruling socialists failed to learn the deathly rainstorm’s lesson. Only 10 percent of the grid’s input flowed from dams and reservoirs on Monday morning.
Much as in October, Spain’s theatrical polarization is muddling the response, while shrouding the blackout’s root causes beneath a veneer of vacuous barb-trading among the two major parties. Only 20 days prior, the entity that controls Spain’s grid—a partly state-owned corporation chaired by a former socialist minister with no background in energy—had re-affirmed that blackouts were not even a remote possibility. After this week’s events showed that promise to be bunk, the company released a preliminary report ruling out a cyberattack as the cause of the disaster—a conclusion that suggests Spain’s own policies are to blame, and thus that a blackout could have been foreseen. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced his green ministry would lead its own inquiry, which likely will point the finger at groups and forces outside the Spanish government’s control.
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Sánchez hasn’t yet acknowledged the pressing need for nuclear power that the blackout made even more evident. What he has done is pass the buck to the right-of-center opposition for allegedly toying with climate and anti-government “disinformation” narratives—a familiar tactic, as he has dismissed accusations of corruption in his inner circle as fake news. To be fair, the opposition Partido Popular’s questioning of the prime minister rings of the same hollow, partisan politicking. Like many right-of-center outlets across Europe, the party has not substantially questioned the underlying green push that led Spain to the latest disaster, and it lacks a national agenda to take energy policy in a better direction.
But beyond fractious Spain, a silver lining is to be found in the broader West. The EU’s right-of-center consensus once accommodated the same green zealotry that still lacks a meaningful challenger in Spain, but has gradually abandoned those pieties in favor of nuclear power. German chancellor Friedrich Merz, for example, campaigned in February on a moratorium to Germany’s disastrous nuclear dismantling, while recent reports by the European Commission fused plans for a single EU energy market with a clear bet on nuclear, understood to be critical to the EU’s competitiveness. Teresa Ribera, the Spanish EU Commissioner for the Green Deal, once pushed for radical environmentalism, but after arriving to Brussels, she has made clear she wouldn’t obstruct member states looking to expand nuclear.
For the largely harmless nature of Monday’s blackout, Spaniards don’t have their left-wing rulers to thank. The outage could have turned far uglier, with rationing and anarchic lawlessness, if continued power fluctuations had kept the lights off for longer—and, after all, the blackout was already frightening enough. With the help of inquirers, interested observers, and plain common sense, the anguish that Spaniards experienced on Monday won’t be in vain. The global movement to discard the misguided ambitions and failed policies of the net-zero rush couldn’t have asked for better evidence.
