The Pain in Spain

A lesson on power grid failure from relying on renewables

Foreword

The blackout in Spain 4/28/25 was such an important event that I’ve decided to make this a ‘living document’ so it will be an ongoing historical resource. Excerpts from new articles, with links to the sources will be dated and added to the original post at the end, along with occasional Notes. This foreword will also be updated to credit the writers.

The audio will not be updated. You’ll need to refer to the written version and the Addendum if you want to stay up-to-date.

Here are the names of those contributors who are knowledgeable about the importance of inertia and momentum in power grids, or interested in it, and the inadequacy of grids that rely too much on so-called ‘renewable’ energy…

First, Gene Nelson’s 3/4/24 article “Why is Grid Inertia Important” is certainly one of the seminal posts on the subject.

Also, Kilovar 1959’s posts are excellent resources: “Power Systems - Let's Talk About Frequency”, “Power Systems - Inertia- Big Iron Rolling”, “Power Systems - It's a Balancing Act”, “Power Systems - It's a Renewable Thing”, and “Power Systems - Let's get Connected”

Other writers, on the Blackout: Irina Slav, Jeff Childers, Alex Chalmers, Thomas Shepstone, Robert Bryce, Pandreco, Isaac Orr, John Kemp, Tyler Durden, Michael Schellenberger, Stu Turley, Lin Bo-Yu, Richard Lyon, environMENTAL, Meredith Angwin…

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original post, 5/1/25

If you think these first two news items are unrelated, I’ve got some beach property in Tucson to sell you…

April 16th news, from PV Magazine:

2 weeks later, as Irina Slav reports:

“MADRID, April 28 (Reuters) - A massive blackout that hit most of the Iberian Peninsula on Monday was due to a sudden, large drop in power supply that caused the grid interconnection between Spain and France to trip, according to Spanish grid operator REE…The network lost 15 gigawatts of electricity generation in five seconds…, the Energy Ministry said on Monday evening, without explaining the reason for the loss.”

I and many others have written about the particular power grid vulnerability that can topple all interconnected grids like a row of dominoes and plunge us into darkness.

Last December, I published an article about how vulnerable our power grids are when they rely too much on wind and solar ‘renewables’ for electricity.

Jeff Childers’ Coffee&Covid had a unique, colorful way of describing the devastation of this large a blackout:

“¡Ay, caramba! Across two and a half European countries, at exactly 12:35pm local time, all the electric trains and subways stopped. Elevators froze. Computers died. ATM’s seized up. Planes couldn’t land. Traffic lights winked out. City streets became coagulated arteries. In short, it was general chaos served with a cold side of uncooked yucca fries…Don’t miss this: Yesterday marked the largest peacetime blackout in European history. Rebooting the power grid took about 18 hours, giving millions unscheduled vacations from screen time.”

Alex Chalmers, with Works in Progress wrote one of the clearest explanations of grid inertia I’ve seen. I highly recommend you read the entire article if you want to know what probably caused the huge blackout in Spain and Portugal. Here is a lengthy excerpt, copied directly with no editing needed:

“Before tens of millions of people lost access to power, it appears that frequency across the Spanish grid dropped by about 0.15 hertz. Electricity grids rely on alternating current, which is current that regularly changes direction, switching back and forth in a regular pattern. Frequency is the rate at which this current oscillates.

Every country in the world has a grid designed around the large rotating generators used in nuclear, coal, and gas power plants. They rely on heat boiling water into steam to drive spinning turbines. These generators usually weigh over 100 tonnes and spin at over 3,000 revolutions per minute, meaning that they contain significant kinetic energy, like a very heavy spinning top. If supply drops, the rotor will begin to decelerate, but some of its momentum will be converted into electrical energy. This ‘inertia’ will buy the grid the few seconds it needs to activate its fast-response systems – deploying energy from battery storage and firing up small gas powered engines. This means that frequency should not fluctuate outside a small band even when a large generator trips.

Solar panels, on the other hand, directly convert sunlight into electricity without the use of rotating turbines. They are then connected to the grid using electronic inverters, which convert the direct current electricity generated by solar panels into the alternating current that buildings and the grid can use. These inverters don’t provide inertia. Instead, they either follow a pre-programmed frequency or mirror the rest of the grid. When the proportion of inverter-based resources versus traditional generators increases, the total physical mass spinning in the system decreases. This means there is less physical momentum to absorb any shocks to the system.

Maintaining a stable frequency is critical. Both the generators that power the grid and the devices that draw from it are designed to operate at specific frequencies. Many devices connected to the grid will overheat, experience mechanical stress, or break if the frequency of the current they receive varies. This affects everything from electric clocks to industrial motors.”

catch 22 - the cure will raise prices even more

Here’s another excerpt. This is from Thomas Shepstone’s Energy Security and Freedom 5/1/25, with credit to the Institute for Energy Research.

“In a renewable-dominated system, the stability support traditionally granted by these traditional generators will no longer be available. To deal with this issue, solar and wind generators would need to be required to contribute to frequency control and other grid-forming services by adding more very expensive electricity storage batteries, as well as synchronous condensers and compensaters. That will drive up European electricity costs much more than they have already, making more Europeans energy poor.

Grid operators had to perform a complicated “black start” operation to restore electricity supplies to the Iberian Peninsula. Usually, a black start begins with small diesel generators starting up without drawing power from the grid. This process helps gradually re-energize the grid as more generators and transmission lines are brought back into service; then loads can be gradually reconnected as sufficient generation becomes available. Solar power has not traditionally contributed to black start operations.”

A foretaste of doom

Despite the media’s lackluster coverage, this country-wide blackout is a watershed moment. If this can happen on a fairly normal day - with no reports of extreme weather, and no evidence of a terrorist attack, it’s a harbinger of doom for Europe’s future unless they wake up and quickly get back to reliable and stable sources of electric power, like coal, gas, and nuclear. Never mind the fact that businesses and industries are already leaving because of the exorbitant rises in the cost of electricity caused by wasting billions of euros on wind and solar - this could be a return to the Dark Ages for them - in more ways than one.

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Addendum and Notes

From Robert Bryce, 5/2/25: “Big media outlets are also in denial. On Wednesday, Reuters published an article that claimed while “it may be tempting” to pin the blackout on wind and solar, “Reliance on renewables is not to blame.”

From Pandreco, 5/2/25: “Had the grid restart been days, or even weeks1 - the adage that society is “nine meals from anarchy” would have been sorely tested. Traffic lights not working are the least of your problems when the water supply fails and you have no food.”

From Isaac Orr, 5/3/25 “Data… show that wholesale power prices were slightly negative from midnight on April 29th leading up to the blackout. These negative prices are well below the marginal operating costs of the conventional power plants, and as a result, the market essentially told them that their services were not needed.”

This tweet shows Spain completely dark, by David Sobolewski, and the graph, 4/29/25, as reported by Tyler Durden: “Spain's black start after the cascading power failure relied heavily on gas-fired and hydro generators to re-energise the grid and establish synchronism," commodities analyst John Kemp wrote on X.”

From Michael Schellenberger’s Public 4/30/25: “Spain’s electrical grid operator admitted on a conference call yesterday that it was a “massive” loss of renewable energy generation that triggered the blackout and said that it was “very likely” the initial disturbance came from solar.”

Stu Turley’s “Enbergy News Beat” podcast 5/5/25, had guest energy expert Kathryn Porter. She said “France actually has a very high inertia system because they primarily have nuclear and hydro. And so the chances of a blackout spreading across Europe from Iberia via France is actually really low. Because the French grid is very strong… the impact on France was extremely limited it was very contained and power was restored to that region extremely quickly which really highlights the importance of inertia on the grid.” emphasis mine

From Reccessary.com 5/7/25, article by Lin Bo-yu: “More details have emerged surrounding Spain’s massive blackout on April 28. According to an investigation, three separate power outages occurred before the widespread outage.

In response to the growing demand and supply fluctuations of renewable energy, experts estimate that over a trillion dollars in investment will be required to modernize Europe’s power grids and expand energy storage systems.” emphasis mine

5/9/25- from Richard Lyon, in “The State of Britain”

“the UK’s Royal Society estimates the cost of installing sufficient long term grid storage to prevent Iberian Peninsula style renewables blackouts at around £1 trillion for a hydrogen system—battery storage is an order of magnitude greater.”

I have no idea why this implies the first choice for backup would be hydrogen - which in itself is a loser because it takes more energy to produce it than what you get out of it - simple laws of chemistry and physics. A much better backup would be a good old fashioned coal or gas power plant - but of course they would never go for that!

5/11/25 - from environMental

“Just before the blackout, only two of Spain’s seven nuclear reactors were running at full power, with two others running around 70% in flexible operation because of the amount of wind and solar on the grid. The four reactors were generating at about half of the Spanish nuclear fleet’s 7.1 Gw capacity. Another plant was taking advantage of mild weather/demand in the shoulder months to refuel. What about the remaining two?…[they] were not operating. Why? Due to several successive days of incredibly low prices in Spain’s day-ahead electricity market. How low? €0/Megawatt hour (or less). In Spain’s managed electricity market (pretending to be a free market), electricity prices can actually go negative. A Gigawatt scale nuclear power plant is not going to operate for zero revenue or pay the grid operator to let it put power on the grid.” emphasis mine

5/11/25 - from Meredith Angwin

“Within 30 seconds, the Iberian peninsula was blacked out, as if someone had turned off the switch.

Indeed, the grid had switched itself off. The Iberian grid was depending heavily on solar, and the solar was depending heavily on switches. The switches have a fancy name (inverters), but at the core, they are still switches.

Thermal (gas, coal, nuclear) power plants and hydro plants run on a different system: they have huge spinning generators, not inverters. The generators are big, they are spinning, and they want to keep spinning. They have inertia.

When you turn off a light, you flick a switch. In contrast, when you want to stop your car, you have to deal with the fact that your car wants to keep going and the wheels want to keep spinning…” she goes on to compare with the similar incidents in Texas and explains why they were more easily controlled.

6/1/25 - Kilovar 1959 has written the most comprehensive look at the blackout in Spain yet, in “The Iberian Blackout - On That Day”, I’ll just repriont an excerpt here, but I hope you’ll read the entire article - he knows what he’s talking about, despite his using my substack tag in “So that’s my two cents” - LOL.

Here’s one of his conclusions:

“It was all the renewables fault! Well, was it really, or was it the fault of the System to not prepare for the realities of what they were doing? You will notice I have used the word renewable very little, and talked about IBRs, it’s the IBR [Inverter Based Resources] technology combined with most renewables sources lack of inertia that caused much of the problem”