Blackout in Spain to cost 2-4 billion Euro, likely due to solar plants — blind and biased ABC says “cause is a mystery”

By Jo Nova

The latest news is that power has been restored in Spain, Portugal and parts of France, but the economic loss of a blackout that affected up to 55 million people for half a day is estimated at 2-4 billion Euro. Even Red Electrica, the Spanish Grid manager now says the initial event was a sudden power loss that was “likely solar”. And to top it off, the group that own the Spanish grid manager warned in February that with so many “renewables” the grid faced the risk of disconnections.

Meanwhile the billion-dollar-ABC is so far behind the times, on prime-time news tonight they were still saying the blackouts in Spain were a complete mystery — and did not mention renewables once, even though energy experts had warned this would happen for years, and were asking that question yesterday.

We are three days from an election and the ABC are running cover for the Labor-Greens party, and hiding from Australians that too many renewables and a lack of stable thermal or nuclear power plants were a front running cause. Even yesterday we knew that solar was supplying 60% of the Spanish grid, and that there was almost no spinning inertia on the Iberian Peninsula. If Spain had hosted the Olympics this week, the ABC-BBC-CBC agitprop units would have raved about it being “78% renewable”. But when it’s an Olympic-size blackout, crickets.

The ABC has a whole “science unit” but one blogger with no government funding is two days ahead of them. Will they catch up tomorrow, or will they continue to put their own personal voting preferences and juicy career prospects ahead of Australian voters?

Spanish grid operator added that it was “very likely” (“muy posible”) that the 1st event was solar generation. But also said it was lacking data to say it conclusively. https://t.co/5DVQQhMYIy

— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) April 29, 2025

A renewables-dominant grid has many points of failure and very few points of stability

It sounds similar to the South Australian blackout of 2016. Once a few wind or solar generators trip out for some reason, the voltage or frequency shocks in the system cause other generators to drop out and interconnectors to disconnect. There is no inherent stability in the system because they lack the heavy spinning turbines. Our entire national grids were designed around heavy 500 ton turbines which spin at 3,000 revolutions per minute (or 3,600 RPM in the USA). That’s an awesome amount of inertia, and all that stability was “free” — it was just part of the grid. But the subsidized market, and the pagan fixation on “renewables”, because they supposedly stop storms next century, guarantees that reliable turbines get pushed out of the market. The crazy-balloon has filled the room.

Spain, Portugal switch back on, seek answers after biggest ever blackout

Reuters

Red Eléctrica rules out a cyberattack, and everything points to overconfidence in solar energy.

Something that has already caused problems recently. The Repsol oil company’s refinery in Cartagena, one of Europe’s largest diesel producers, had to shut down a few weeks ago due to power problems. The blackout occurred at 12:32 p.m., but the system began to fail at 11:30 a.m. With the sun shining, operators began to notice fluctuations in the grid with photovoltaic production at full blast. This excess sunlight caused the gas-fired combined cycle plants to reduce their production to make way for photovoltaic power.

In that sense, nuclear power didn’t enter the market to avoid losing money, and there was no need to rely on hydroelectric plants to avoid water loss. Without firmness technologies, the voltage became more fluctuating and vulnerable than ever. And then the incident happened. The 5-second voltage drop is an eternity in the electrical system and tripped the “system differentials,” shutting down everything at once: the photovoltaic, the cycles, the four remaining nuclear plants.

The industry insists we were lucky because the transformers didn’t burn out, which would have caused a blackout lasting more than 24 hours. ” Red Eléctrica miscalculated the risks and allowed the closure of three nuclear power plants that would have provided stability (voltage) to the system ,” the industry claims.

So there were plenty of warnings that things were going wrong.

If only the media in Europe had mentioned the 2016 SA Electricity crisis, people in Spain would have known:

People saw The South Australian (SA) black out coming. There were warnings that the dominance of renewables made it vulnerable. Then when it came, it all fell over in an instant —  Three towers, six windfarms and 12 seconds to disaster. Ultimately the 40% renewable SA grid was crippled by complexity.   The AEMO Report blamed renewables: The SA Blackout was due to lack of “synchronous inertia”, they said.  The early estimates suggest the blackout costs South Australia at least $367m, plus their normal electricity is twice the price. Welcome to the future of unreliable electricity: More bad luck for South Australia, yet another blackout followed the first one, 300 powerlines down, 125,000 homes cut off. By 2019, things still weren’t secure, SA was offering $6,000 subsidies to buy batteries but people didn’t want them.  In 2020 SA is still at risk of blackout, one third of solar PV “switching off” to save state, and they need a $1.5b interconnector bandaid to NSW. In 2022, they suffered more blackouts. South Australia was Islanded, flying by the seat of their pants, afraid of a solar surge on a sunny day. By 2023 the Renewables Star state “urgently” wants to force two diesel plants back to stop blackouts.

The pain of bad decisions never ends, unless they admit they were stupid.