Power Blackout, Political Blackout, Media Blackout
For years, the Iberian Peninsula has courted disaster. This outage was both anticipated and warned about. Yet, in France, the issue continues to be suppressed.
Two days after the massive power outage that left Spain, Portugal, and parts of southern France in the dark, what do we know? This was no mere glitch. The event exposes the fragility of national energy strategies, driven by a flawed European energy policy. As we’ll explore, this crisis was foreseeable, with repeated warnings and comparable incidents globally, as highlighted on April 28 by American journalist Michael Shellenberger.
In France, it took 48 hours for the role of intermittent renewable energy sources, particularly solar, to gradually come under scrutiny, as we noted in an earlier piece
Intermittent renewable energy sources (RES) cannot deliver the adaptability required during grid failures. Two days ago, Spain lost 15 gigawatts—comparable to the output of 15 1000 MW nuclear reactors—in an instant. Despite RES accounting for a major share of production (at 12:30, 78% came from solar and wind), they could not fill the gap.
This outage, beyond weather factors, highlights the risks of depending heavily on inverter-based renewables, which lack adequate backup, inertia, or stabilization. RES significantly amplify the grid’s fragility.