Regular Planet Gore readers will recall the recent study on Spanish-government investments in renewable energy — mandates and other interventions that served as the express model for President Obama’s “green jobs” regime — which I wrote about here and here. The study clearly struck a nerve, considering it drew so much (and so strange) return fire — from a fairly pathetic ad hominem attack by a blogger at the Wall Street Journal’s Environmental Capital (a post soon answered by a WSJ editorial hailing the study . . . you know, on the merits) to the disingenuous deflections by the White House’s point man Van Jones. Well, Spain’s own government has now weighed in.

Left-of-center paper El País today reported a governmental study (Ministry of Industry and Energy) finding that renewables are threatening the electricity grid and the price of electricity, and recognizing Spain’s system produced a bubble. It also shows that what the Minister says to Americans (“please join our spectacularly succesful scheme. Cheers, M. Ponzi”) — for instance, last week in Chicago, in order to blunt study author Dr. Gabriel Calzada’s appearances in Washington, D.C. — is very different from what his team tells Spaniards (“we’re the ‘world leader’ . . . sorry, we’ll find a way out”).

Here’s what a Spaniard describes to me as his fast translation of the article (emphases added):

Renewables threatens the electric grid according to Industry
R. M. – Madrid – 09/05/2009
The Ministry of Industry has warned that the explosion in renewables threatens the power grid and the price of electricity. Because of that, in the royal decree that approved the social tariff (a tariff that obliges the utilities to give free electricity to low income people) and was published Thursday in the BOE created a registry to control projects, and warned of a reduction in rates. The government wants to avoid bubbles in thermosolar energy like the ones that solar photovoltaic suffered last year.
The text of the decree differs from the government’s position: “The path that these technologies [renewables] are following could in the short run risk the sustainability of the system, both from an economic point of view on the impact on the electric rate, as well as from a technical point of view.“
The president of the Association of Productions of Renewables, José María Vélez, complained that the warning arrived only two days after minister Miguel Sebastián defended in Chicago the Spanish model for renewables.