Six days ago, the media celebrated a significant milestone: Spain’s national grid operated entirely on renewable energy for the first time during a weekday.
At 12:35 pm today local time, the lights went out across Spain and Portugal, and parts of France.
As Michael Shellenberger writes at PUBLIC, this wasn’t just a Spanish blackout. It shook the entire European grid.
…none of this should have been a surprise. The underlying physics had been understood for years, and the specific vulnerabilities had been spelled out repeatedly in technical warnings that policymakers ignored.
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As countries replaced heavy, spinning plants with lightweight, inverter-based generation, the grid became faster, lighter, and far more sensitive to disruptions. That basic physical reality was spelled out in public warnings as far back as 2017.
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Although political leaders promised that renewable energy would provide stable, affordable power, in practice, Spain grew more reliant on the remaining nuclear and natural gas plants to sustain inertia — even as the government pushes them to close.
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Despite all these warnings, political and regulatory energy in Europe remained focused on accelerating renewable deployment, not upgrading the grid’s basic stability. In Spain, solar generation continued to climb rapidly through 2023 and early 2024.
Coal plants closed. Nuclear units retired.
On many spring days by 2025, Spain’s midday solar generation exceeded its total afternoon demand, leading to frequent negative electricity prices.
The system was being pushed to the limit.
And today, at 12:35 pm, it broke.
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Spain’s blackout wasn’t just a technical failure. It was a political and strategic failure.
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Unless Spain rapidly invests in synthetic inertia, maintains and expands its nuclear fleet, or adds some other new form of heavy rotating generation, the risk of future blackouts will only grow worse.
Read Michael Shellenberger’s full take here…
Crucially, comprehending problem of inertia (or lack of it) is key to apportioning blame for this farce in a major western nation in the 21st century. Mark Nelson (@EnergyBants) simplifies the concept with the following useful metaphor:
The Small or medium-sized disturbances on the grid become very difficult to manage and can cascade into wider instability and outages when the grid is in a low inertia condition, as was the case Monday in Spain just before the massive ongoing blackout
Update (1126ET): Portugal’s grid operator, REN (Rede Eléctrica Nacional), claimed that the massive power outage affecting Portugal and Spain was sparked by a “rare atmospheric phenomenon,” specifically “extreme temperature variations” in the Spanish electricity grid.
Additional BBC News headlines of the chaos unfolding across Europe’s Iberian Peninsula:
- Delays at Spanish and Portuguese airports
- In London, Gatwick reports delayed flights to affected areas
- Portugal blames outage on ‘fault in Spain’s electricity grid’
- ‘Extreme temperature variations in Spain’ contributed to outage – Portuguese grid officials
- Restoring power across Portugal ‘could take up to a week‘
- No indications of any cyber attack, says European Council president
- Power back on in some substations, says Spain’s electric operator, but railways still suspended
- French operator supplying electricity to Spain
- Grid operator says power returning in parts of Iberian peninsula
“I’m in Spain and trust me the issue isn’t the darkness…No payments possibles without cash (so no food and transportation), very limited internet and no clue whether it’ll actually be resolved,” one X user told Javier.
More at:
Europe Asking ‘Who Turned the Lights Out?!’
Over reliance on renewables causes destabilization of the grid without backup sources
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…
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.
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.
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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…
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Death toll rises to 70 in Iran port explosion as interior minister blames ‘negligence’
Iran‘s interior minister on Monday blamed “negligence” for a massive explosion that killed 70 people at the country’s largest commercial port, as firefighters finally extinguished the blaze at the facility two days later.
The blast occurred on Saturday at the Shahid Rajaee Port in Iran’s south, near the strategic Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which one-fifth of global oil output passes.
“Unfortunately, the death toll has reached 70, and the firefighting effort is almost in its final stages,” Mehrdad Hassanzadeh, the crisis management director of Hormozgan province where the port is located, told state TV.
Officials have said more than 1,000 people were injured. The province’s crisis management director, Mehrdad Hassanzadeh, said most had already been released after treatment.
On Monday, Interior Minister Eskandar Momeni told state TV that “culprits have been identified and summoned”, and that the blast was caused by “shortcomings, including noncompliance with safety precautions and negligence”.
Momeni, who has been in the area since hours after the blast, stated that the “investigation is still underway”.
Iran’s state TV showed images of firefighters still dousing the flames Monday, and said the damage would be assessed after the fire was fully brought under control.
Heavy charcoal-black smoke continued to billow over low flames at part of the site, above which a firefighting helicopter flew, pictures from the Iranian Red Crescent showed.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has ordered a probe into the incident.
Smoke, then a fireball
It was not immediately clear what caused the explosion but the port’s customs office said it likely resulted from a fire that broke out at the hazardous and chemical materials storage depot.
CCTV images on social media showed it began gradually, with a small fire belching orange-brown smoke among a few containers stacked outside, across from a warehouse.
A small forklift truck drives past the area and men can be seen walking nearby.
About one minute after the small fire and smoke become visible, a fireball erupts as vehicles pass nearby, with men running for their lives.
President Masoud Pezeshkian visited hospitals treating the wounded on Sunday in the nearby city of Bandar Abbas.
Since the explosion, authorities have ordered all schools and offices in the
area closed, and have urged residents to avoid going outside “until further notice” and to use protective masks.
More at:
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