The Spanish Government Is Lying About The Blackouts . . . the MAJOR problem with Renewables they Never Told Us About . . .
by Michael Shellenberger, Public News, April 30, 2025
Renewable energy had nothing to do with Spain’s catastrophic blackouts, its Prime Minister says, insisting instead that the real culprit was a rare technical failure unrelated to the country’s green energy transition. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez went further and reiterated his government’s opposition to nuclear energy, which he called “far from being a solution.”
Six days ago, the media celebrated a significant milestone: Spain’s national grid operated entirely on renewable energy for the first time during a weekday.
At 12:35 pm Monday 4-28-25, local time, the lights went out across Spain and Portugal, and parts of France. Although power was quickly restored in France, it could take a week to fully restore power in Spain and Portugal.
In an instant, the electric hum of modern life — trains, hospitals, airports, phones, traffic lights, cash registers — fell silent. Tens of millions of people instantly plunged into chaos, confusion, and darkness. People got stuck in elevators. Subways stopped between stations. Gas stations couldn’t pump fuel. Grocery stores couldn’t process payments. Air traffic controllers scrambled as systems failed and planes were diverted. In hospitals, backup generators sputtered on, but in many cases could not meet full demand. Cell towers collapsed under surges and outages.
It was one of the largest peacetime blackouts Europe has ever seen. And it was not random. It was not an unforeseeable event. It was the exact failure that many of us have been, repeatedly, warning lawmakers about for years — warnings that Europe’s political leaders systematically chose to ignore.
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While Portugal’s grid operator REN initially blamed the mass blackout on “extreme temperature variations” and a “rare atmospheric phenomenon,” and while some media repeated that framing, the reality is more serious. Weather may have triggered the event, but it was not the cause of the system’s collapse.
Spain’s national grid operator, Red Eléctrica, revealed that the immediate cause of the blackout was a “very strong oscillation in the electrical network” that forced Spain’s grid to disconnect from the broader European system, leading to the collapse of the Iberian Peninsula’s power supply at 12:38 p.m.
“No one has ever attempted a black start on a grid that relies so heavily on renewables as Iberia,” noted one energy analyst on X. “The limited number of thermal generators will make it more challenging to re-establish momentum and frequency control.”
In a traditional power grid dominated by heavy spinning machines — coal plants, gas turbines, nuclear reactors — small disturbances, even from severe weather, are absorbed and smoothed out by the sheer physical inertia of the system. The heavy rotating mass of the generators acts like a shock absorber, resisting rapid changes in frequency and stabilizing the grid.
But in an electricity system dominated by solar panels, wind turbines, and inverters, there is almost no physical inertia. Solar panels produce no mechanical rotation. Most modern wind turbines are electronically decoupled from the grid and provide little stabilizing force. Inverter-based systems, which dominate modern renewable energy grids, are precise but delicate. They follow the frequency of the grid rather than resisting sudden changes.
But none of this should have been a surprise. The underlying physics had been understood for years, and the specific vulnerabilities had been spelled out repeatedly in technical warnings that policymakers ignored.
For over a century, electricity grids were built around heavy, spinning machines like coal plants, gas turbines, and nuclear reactors. These machines spun massive metal shafts at thousands of revolutions per minute, creating electricity while also providing inertia, which smoothed out shocks to the grid and gave operators time to respond to faults. It was free and automatic.
The rise of solar and wind changed that. Solar panels do not spin heavy turbines. Wind turbines, while they do spin, are usually electronically decoupled from the grid and do not provide direct mechanical inertia. Both rely on inverters — electronics that convert direct current (DC) from the source into alternating current (AC) for the grid. Inverters are fast, efficient, and precise, but they have no mass, no stored momentum, and therefore no ability to stabilize the system when it wobbles. Inverters follow the grid’s frequency, but they do not resist changes.
As countries replaced heavy, spinning plants with lightweight, inverter-based generation, the grid became faster, lighter, and far more sensitive to disruptions. That basic physical reality was spelled out in public warnings as far back as 2017.
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As a result, when a disturbance hit Spain’s grid on April 28, there was too little heavy machinery to dampen the oscillations. Instead, the oscillations grew rapidly, shaking the grid apart. Protection systems tripped offline to prevent equipment damage. Plants disconnected. Regions split from one another. And within minutes, tens of millions of people were left without power across Spain and Portugal. The underlying cause of the blackout was not weather. It was the structural fragility created by heavy reliance on inverter-based renewable energy, without sufficient backup, inertia, or stabilization.
Five minutes before the blackout, at 12:30 p.m. local time, Spain’s electricity grid was running under highly unusual and dangerous conditions. Solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, and wind power together supplied about 78 percent of all generation. Nuclear provided about 11.5 percent. Co-generation, mostly industrial waste heat plants, added another 5 percent. Gas-fired plants contributed just about 3 percent — less than one gigawatt across the entire grid.
This meant that almost no dispatchable, spinning generation was online. No heavy turbines. No stabilizing momentum. Almost no inertia, the physical property that resists sudden changes in motion, and which has stabilized electrical grids for over 100 years.
As a result, when the disturbance hit at around 12:35 p.m., the system had nothing to resist it. The grid’s frequency, essentially the heartbeat of the system, instantly plunged. The disturbance didn’t just affect Spain. Grid frequency drops were registered across continental Europe.
This wasn’t just a Spanish blackout. It shook the entire European grid.
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