Whodunit: Did Green Policies Kill Spain’s Power Grid?

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What prompted a system-wide failure in Spain’s power grid on Monday? Thus far, officials in Spain and Portugal remain tight-lipped, leading to a free-wheeling speculation market for armchair sleuths. Was it sabotage? Incompetence? Or bad public policy that made the grid unable to adjust to variables?

Jim Geraghty has a great round-up this morning at NRO, some of which will be covered here, but he also sets the scale of the failure in stark terms. The Spaniards claim that 15 gigawatts of supply suddenly dropped out twice in two seconds, forcing the grid to shut down rather than suffer catastrophic damage. How much is 15 gigawatts? Jim explains:

Even if you’re not that familiar with electricity, you probably remember Doc Brown gasping about “1.21 gigawatts” in Back to the Future, and what an enormous amount of electrical power that was in 1955. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, to generate one gigawatt, you would need nearly 2 million solar panels, 294 wind turbines on land, 103 offshore wind turbines, 1.3 million horses, or half a Hoover Dam. With one gigawatt, you could power 100 million LED Bulbs, 2,627 Tesla Model 3s, or almost one time-traveling DeLorean.

In other words, in an instant, Spain and Portugal lost seven-and-a-half Hoover Dams’ worth of electricity.

Needless to say, that scope of disaster hardly sounds like an organic failure. Spain’s judiciary isn’t buying that either, and launched a major investigation into its causes. They want all records submitted within ten days, and despite the reassuring words from the Spanish government, the court is specifically looking into the possibility of a cyberattack. Jim is skeptical of that explanation, mainly because neither Spain nor Portugal are particularly relevant to the main villains of cyberattacks — Russia, Iran, and China, although Jim mainly focuses on Russia.

If it wasn’t overt malice or unbelievable incompetence, then what was the cause? Even the New York Times wonders whether Spain’s energy policies might have created the failure, thanks to an overreliance on solar and wind power:

Spain’s power company, Red Eléctrica, proudly declared on April 16 that enough renewable energy had been generated to cover demand. “The ecological transition is moving forward,” it said.

Less than two weeks later, Spain and Portugal experienced an 18-hour blackout that disrupted daily life, shutting down businesses and schools and crippling trains and mobile networks.

Officials have given few details on the cause of the outage. But the incident exposed how Spain and Portugal, promoted as success stories in Europe’s renewable energy transition, are also uniquely vulnerable to outages, given their relative isolation from the rest of the continent’s energy supply.

Frankly, the real direction that green-energy policies create is backward. More on that in a minute, but first, the NYT also supplies a technical reason for the inflexibility of solar and wind compared to traditional fossil fuel and nuclear sources:

Old-line generation sources like gas turbines and nuclear plants have a spinning momentum known as inertia, which helps buffer the fluctuations that are more common with intermittent sources like wind and solar power.

When the Spanish grid became unstable about midday on Monday, it might have been easier to keep the system functioning if conventional power sources like natural gas or nuclear turbines had a larger presence, analysts say.

That’s certainly one reason, but the issue with “green” energy is more systemic. Turbine systems, whether operated by fossil fuel or nuclear reactors, produce a scalable output. In a properly balanced system, they wouldn’t normally run at full capacity for any significant period of time. When a failure in the grid occurs, those sources can usually be ramped up to cover the loss. Furthermore, when demand starts challenging potential capacity, additional supply can be built efficiently in terms of land use and connection infrastructure.

None of that applies to green energy sources. They produce full output at all times and lack any sort of scalability. The only way to generate more energy from those sources is to build more facilities, which take up vast swaths of land at any usable scale. Green energy provides no flexibility even in normal use, and is next to worthless when crises require more supply to the grid in a short period of time. 

In that sense, it doesn’t really matter what caused the failure in the acute sense. Whether it was cyberterrorism, incompetence, or equipment-related breakdowns, the whole system is designed to fail outside of perfect operating parameters. Green-dominant power systems lack enough scalable output to rescue the grid in a supply crisis, especially one on the 15-gigawatt scale. 

This is what I meant by going backward. Modern power systems were designed for fault tolerance by building scalable supply capacity at enough scale to keep momentary faults from taking down the whole grid. The shift to renewables, along with environmental activists fighting the addition of scalable supply based on fossil fuels and nuclear power, has sapped much of the flexibility from the US grids. That’s part of the reason the Texas grid failed in 2021, and a big part of the reason that California routinely experiences brownouts every year and has to buy fossil-fuel-produced electricity from its neighbors to keep the grid operating. 

The whodunit in the acute sense doesn’t matter. What does matter are the public policies designed to fail, and fail spectacularly. There is nothing wrong with green energy as a plus-up to a properly engineered power system (except for the massively inefficient land use), but any system that relies on ‘renewable’ energy for core demand service is a system designed for an eventual third-world status for its region or nation. Those populations had better plan for the Dark Ages, because that is where green-energy-reliant systems will take them … literally.