In Spain and Portugal, the rushed rollout of renewables and an overreliance on solar and wind energy clearly weakened these nations’ electric grids.
Roughly 60 million people lost power for twelve hours this week in Spain, Portugal, and parts of southern France, prompting absolute chaos. For once, even the usual defenders of solar and wind power admit that green energy bears at least some of the blame.
“The company suspects that an initial power failure was ‘very likely’ due to a solar plant producing less than expected, and seconds later there was a ‘massive’ drop in other renewable-electricity production,” wrote an opinion columnist in Bloomberg, an outlet that is usually in favor of wind and solar power. “Left unsaid is another critical factor: Spain and Portugal were running their grid with a generation mix that relied heavily on the weather — for more than 75% of output. Few of the old-fashioned generators powered by gas, nuclear, and hydraulic force, which are key to ensuring a stable grid, were running.”
Others struck a defensive tone. “Don’t blame renewables for Spain’s power outage,” cautioned an energy columnist at Reuters, protesting a bit too much. “While it may be tempting to blame the unprecedented power outage that hit the Iberian Peninsula this week on the rapid growth of wind and solar power in Spain, reliance on renewables is not to blame,” he said. “Rather, the issue appears to be the management of renewables in the modern grid,” the columnist claimed while fallaciously citing a distinction without a difference. Deep in the piece, he admits that the outage is likely the “result of the relatively small share of nuclear and fossil fuel generation in Spain’s power mix.”
The disaster comes roughly a week after Spain became, for the first time, temporarily powered entirely by wind, solar, and hydropower during a weekday, which pro-solar publications touted as a huge success. Just before the blackout, solar and wind energy accounted for almost 80 percent of electricity production in the country, according to snapshots of utility data. The flexible natural gas systems normally required to back up unreliable green energy systems were providing only 3 percent.
A wide variety of causes could have triggered the event, ranging from a highly implausible space-based nuclear weapons test and Russian hackers to simple mismanagement and unspecified “rare atmospheric phenomena.” But the fact remains that Spain and Portugal are overreliant on politically favored green energy. It would not be a surprise if the Iberian power grid simply could not absorb the cascading disruption.
The output of a nuclear reactor, natural gas turbine, or coal plant is highly predictable, unlike the outputs of solar and wind power, which are by definition dependent on intermittent weather conditions. In systems that rely on solar or wind power, therefore, blackouts are more likely because the amount of electricity generated is less predictable and doesn’t coincide with the times of day when power is most needed. This poses an enormous challenge to grid operators. It also makes power grids more fragile: the technology necessary to manage the intermittency inherent to solar and wind power is vastly easier to hack maliciously to trigger voltage imbalances. Earlier this year, cybersecurity researchers identified critical security flaws, which could allow remote sabotage, in the kind of solar inverter systems used in Spain.
Wind and solar power generators lack grid-synchronous turbines, which would stabilize the grid, because of the intermittent nature of the power source. These generators instead produce direct current that is converted to alternating current via inverters. The more wind and solar energy there is on the grid, therefore, the fewer conventional grid-synchronous turbines are available (and the less built-in stability there is), meaning that even tiny fluctuations can quickly cause disasters. Conventional systems are simply more structurally stable compared with grids that rely on inverter-based green energy. A disaster such as the one experienced by Spain and Portugal was therefore entirely predictable. And yet Spain has committed to phasing out reliable nuclear power starting in 2027 and replacing it with fickle wind and solar, which pro–green energy outlets have touted as a “success story.”
The grid failure in Iberia shows how, even in ideal conditions, wind and solar power can prove untrustworthy. Spain and Portugal are among the best places in Europe to harness solar power, given their naturally sunny environments and fairly inexpensive land. Additionally, the mass outage occurred outside of the summer period of peak electricity demand and the winter period of comparatively low supply, meaning that the system failed when it wasn’t even facing serious demand.
Though the precise triggering incident isn’t yet known, the rushed rollout of renewables and an overreliance on solar and wind energy in Spain and Portugal clearly made the grid more vulnerable. To make matters worse, this overreliance on solar and wind greatly delayed efforts to restart the power grid, which took longer than ten hours, as such systems must be slowly and gradually reenergized to prevent another catastrophic collapse. Green energy sources are technically difficult to use for a “black start,” or for restoring unpowered electrical systems. Conventional power systems, conversely, can be reenergized fairly quickly in the event of an accident. France’s power grid, which was importing electricity from Spain at the time, seems to have been spared a similar length of disruption thanks to that country’s heavy use of nuclear power. Only small portions of southern France were affected, and briefly: they regained power much more rapidly than did Spain and Portugal.
Luckily, Europe avoided a continent-wide blackout. This isn’t to downplay the very serious damage caused in Iberia. Vehicles ground to a halt without traffic lights, people were trapped in elevators, cellphones stopped working as towers failed to cope with grid fluctuations, and surgeries were suspended. Dramatic footage showed Spain’s Civil Guard carrying a woman in a wheelchair up six flights of stairs because of a disabled elevator. The country even declared a state of emergency.
This isn’t the first time that an overreliance on so-called green energy has allowed a blackout on a national scale. In 2016, 1.7 million Australians lost power because of “violent fluctuations” in the supply of wind power. (The country’s utility blamed the instability on a wind farm.) A less damaging, but still serious, incident occurred in Germany in 2017, after that country spent over a trillion dollars adding wind and solar power to its energy mix. In 2019, moreover, roughly a million Brits lost electricity after a simple lightning strike pushed that nation’s low-inertia power grid into crisis.
Americans aren’t immune to the peril of blackouts made more likely by an overreliance on green energy. In 2022, a punishing heat wave in California triggered rolling blackouts that affected thousands. After the state had spent years aggressively shutting down more-reliable nuclear, coal, and natural gas power plants to boost demand for solar and wind farms, California Governor Gavin Newsom had to proclaim a state of emergency to temporarily reactivate the very conventional power plants he had worked so hard to shut down. Naturally, Newsom blamed the crisis on global warming rather than on his own policies.
A 2016 investigation by the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission found that there is a “significant risk” to the supply of electricity in the United States because of the unreliability of wind and solar power. Let’s hope that our politicians don’t replicate the mistakes of Spain and Portugal.