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Sorry, my memory was off a bit; it had nearly happened before, in 2021, and the report came out 2022. Here’s the report. Neoliberalism, not renewables.
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Wind and solar are great because they generate electricity directly, minus all the inconvenient and inefficient faffing about with enormous heat engines and all the trouble that comes with them.
Batteries don’t really have much capacity. They’re just amazing for electronics and communication, but feeble for heating your house in winter. But we don’t need gigawatts for lighting, computing, communication, etc. It’s heat we need gigawatts for, so why not store heat instead? Phase changes can store vast quantities of heat.
I like low tech and/or simple tech methods. I can’t call solar panels or inverters particularly low tech, but they are simple and low maintenance once set up. Wind and solar are also locally independent for their working life; not reliant on depleting fuel extracted in distant lands, nor global trade, transport, finance, or war.
TRIGGER WARNING – I’m going to say something political here.
Solar and to a lesser extent wind power put a little of the means of production (Marx) into the hands of many ordinary people. Those people gain some autonomy – the electricity company can no longer cut them off completely, they’ll always have enough to run lights and charge phones, and enough for refrigeration in summer when there’s plenty of daylight. Villages and communities pooling their resources and coordinating their demand could do even better, they might have to buy electricity very little. No wonder the old establishment hate wind and solar so much, and project so much propaganda against them!
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My own perspective is that renewables should not be used in an attempt to continue the current “perpetual economic growth at all costs” lunacy mass-extinction project, which is bound to crash and burn relatively soon no matter what energy it runs on. All renewables can do is buy us some time, and help to contrive a softer landing.
Fossil fuels are depleting, they become more and more demanding to obtain. Since 2001 particularly, fossil fuels have demanded war after war to control reserves and keep the price down, and fossil fuel economics currently demands the arming of Israel in its genocide of the Palestinians. How long would the USA support Israel if it wasn’t next door to the oil fields?
I don’t like these big, barren solar farms. There’s still loads of roof space that’s already barren and could have solar. But it’s the “big companies vs. lots of little independent operators” thing again; governments tend to gratify well funded lobbying.
There are also arrangements that suspend a chequerboard of solar panels some metres above agricultural ground, semi-shading and sheltering it, which is useful for some livestock and crops.
Being rid of the big heat engines has massive simplicity appeal. Just look at those big, horrible lumps of dirty, self-degrading complexity you’d no longer need! Combustion chambers, flues, scrubbers, feed belts, evaporators, condensers, heat exchangers, fans, filters, cooling towers and pumps, pumps, pumps.
Just stick a turbine at the top of a tower and the wind will blow it round.
Just put this panel in daylight and it’ll produce power.It’s like magic – if you can handle the intermittency.
I suppose that’s what Labour are really up to with their Net Zero policy. Labour and Tory agree; governments shouldn’t own stuff or do things directly, government should set policy, and leave provision to some sort of market. So by saying “net zero by soon”, the government effectively sets high oncoming levels of intermittency, creating an investment market for storage. Thus do battery farms get built. When the Tories get back in, the wind-solar-storage market has become more competitive against the Tories’ old gas and oil. Thus do factions of the elite compete.
My research shows that Entso-e is the self regulatory body for power and energy suppliers in the EU area, who report to the European Commission and Member States through the Electricity Coordination Group, but is not itself part of the EU structure.
They do however like to employ a lot of ‘experts’, in fact it seems it is stuffed full of ‘experts’
Their report from 2022 seemed to advise the equivalent of putting higher rate fuses in a plug to prevent power loss! It has the look and feel of a can kicking exercise.
This is their production for the current investigation. It is a grandly titled “ENTSO-E expert panel initiates the investigation into the causes of Iberian blackout” What is a panel if it isn’t an ‘expert panel’
It doesn’t give any hint of what they suspect caused the blackout, it only refers to “different generation trips” and “frequency” decreases accompanied by “voltage” increases happening. It then gives a précis of how they got things back to normal.
It doesn’t provide any evidence of experimenting with a grid being tested to see how it reacts to increased amounts of renewables in the system. It just doesn’t discount such suspicions either. So we wait, for “the experts” findings…_
Within five years, the NetZero targets for the UK will be vindicated, failed, amended or abandoned. In the meantime a modicum of rationed and reasoned analysis will have to fill the gap until the results are in. I’m more than confident that the conclusion will be that there is no ‘Climate Crisis’.
The crisis to be overcome is providing electricity in quantities that meet demand; we have the skills, ability and means to do that. It’s time we did just that.I’m just pleased to see the tide turning towards an acceptance of the sceptics arguments. It has taken a great deal of effort, but I am proud of my contribution.
The acceptance now, that trans women are not women has brought me a great sense of reward that my efforts helped us to get the right outcome, I am confident we are near a similar outcome with the climate question…_
Eppure scalda [Italian: Yet it warms.]
Mart: “Eppur si muove” would mean exactly as little to the likes of Digger, and he would be standing yet – howling insults and ridicule, wrapped in ignorant smugness – on the other side of that argument.
I remember climate change denialist Dungroanin (who is forever groanin) insisted that Greta Thunburg’s was faking her support for the Palestinians. I expect that Dungroanin is about as likely to retract that remark as to be aboard the Madleen bound for Gaza, and is anyway too shy to post on this thread.
DiggerUK, May 28 at 08:53
– “Their report from 2022 seemed to advise the equivalent of putting higher rate fuses in a plug to prevent power loss!”
Yes, that’s exactly what you’d do if you’d put too low a fuse in the plug. And that is precisely the point the panel made; multiple protection thresholds had been set too low, causing a perturbation that could have been tolerated instead to cascade into a major disconnection.
But the panel reached a conclusion that contradicted DiggerUK’s pet explanation. Therefore, mock the panel and some technical terms they used, and claim they investigated the wrong thing. I suppose the panel must be part of the global, decades-long conspiracy to cook up a climate crisis where none exists, right? It goes way beyond climate science; even your dentist is in on it, and the three you had in the decades before your current one.
The original article is paywalled at The Daily Telegraph. The Daily Sceptic coverage is linked here. The loss of power in Spain and Portugal can now be figured out…__
So, Digger. The solar installation is gathering and supplying energy to the grid but the pricing structure means they are losing money doing so and the problem is green energy not the contractual arrangements. OK then.
The grid that day had no stability. Neither did it have any spinning reserve.
It seems fairly obvious that nobody had a plan, or was it simply that no one was really in charge.The unreliability of solar is usually referred to in regards to supply, which is down to nature, here, the unreliability was down to market forces.
Why so flippant ET, it seems that there is much more to emerge about this catastrophe. Lessons must be learned…_
It’s not flippancy Digger. The article you cited explicitly stated it was the market that was the problem not the solar power generation itself.
– “The grid that day had no stability. Neither did it have any spinning reserve.”
It also lacked beam engines, and staff lacked sufficient horses to reach all affected substations swiftly.
Grief DiggerUK, you don’t seem to apply much scepticism when you read the Daily Sceptic. Does your laptop or Android crash because its battery isn’t supplemented by a powered gyroscope? Or do you think it might have some reservoir capacitors on its circuit board, or even a regulated DC-to-DC converter?
You presumably understand that a generator acts as a motor when electrical power is fed into it rather than drawn out of it; this, after all, is the principle behind spinning reserve. If spinning reserve were really necessary to balance a grid, it would be a simple matter to connect motors (i.e. generators) connected to big flywheels. The generators of decommissioned coal or gas fired power stations could even be retained; just remove their steam turbines or machine their blades off to eliminate air drag. It isn’t done because it isn’t necessary.
It’s better to look stupid (by admitting you were wrong) than to stay stupid (by stubbornly refusing to).
Arstechnica has an article on what happened to the Spanish grid.
Worth a read. In it there is a link to a summary of the Spanish government report but it’s in Spanish.
Here is the report in English. I have just come across that link in the comments of the article above and I have not read through it yet. It’s long.
Thanks for that, ET. Interesting, and it did puzzle me why renewables should be blamed, given there was plenty of sun across Spain for the duration, and it was no less windy than usual – I was there at the time.
Your reference concludes:
Opponents of renewable energy were quick to point to the Iberian blackout as evidence of the unreliability of wind and solar (accusations that The New York Times was willing to echo). The investigation indicates that all these accusations were completely without merit.
No sign of them retracting these claims? Nope. Just leave that lazy lie sitting there and sneak off.
How about it, Digger_uk? Any mea-culpa from you for gleefully amplifying these falsehoods, this propaganda for the fossil-fuel industry? Are you still going to “Daily Sceptic” as a reliable source for climate change denialism? Did they ‘update’ their claim that “Solar power to blame for Spain’s disastrous blackout”?
Or have they gone all shy about it, just like yourself.
So. World War Three escalating right now. Climate change maybe won’t prove too significant; war for fossil fuels eclipsed it. I assume the USA will respond to Iran’s response to Trump bombing Iran.
After a number of preliminary reports on the Spanish blackout, none have got anywhere near an explanation, without commenting on the high reliance on renewables in Spanish electricity supplies.
It seems to be the case that nobody made any serious attempt to stress test the system and ask what would be the outcome if this, that, or the other happened. We now end up with many cans, being kicked down many roads, at the same time.
What is more pertinent, is that none of the renewable supporters have come up with any explanation as to what happened.Putting the question of renewables in this catastrophe to one side, it still leaves the fact that this was one giant example of something being 100% FUBAR.
So if it wasn’t the renewables wot dun it, what did…_
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/26/we-must-heed-the-warning-of-spains-net-zero-blackouts/
DiggerUK, yet another fossil fuel propaganda link? Rather conspiracist too, with its “here’s what they won’t tell you” nonsense. I’m finding the Red Electrica report rather dense and technical, but your problem’s obvious enough – a short between the earphones.
Top three recommendation from the report:
* Approval of the System Operator’s proposal for Operating Procedure P.O. 7.4 regarding voltage control service in the Spanish mainland power system, mandating that all generation units capable of real-time voltage regulation must actively perform such control, and establishing penalties for non-compliance.* Approval of the System Operator’s proposal for Operating Procedure P.O. 1.4 concerning energy delivery conditions at boundary points, to incorporate the voltage values specified in Order TED/749/2020.
* Review of overvoltage protection settings on generation evacuation lines, with the potential adjustment of thresholds to slightly above the maximum limits defined in the operating procedures for the transmission network, in order to prevent unnecessary disconnections when voltages approach those limits.
So, two proposals from the System Operator hadn’t been implemented, and the call for penalties implies they had been wilfully ignored. “Inappropriate tripping”, relevant to the third recommendation, is cited five times in the section “Events in the system” section (page 14), which was the point raised in the report about the 2021 disconnection. So although technical, there’s no mystery. ET’s Ars Technica link above seems a good non-technical summary.
– – – – – –I also check out the recommended articles in your links. Smears of anyone opposing Israel’s attempt to obliterate Palestine are depressingly common. One scare story about Iran was particularly deranged. Are you sure you’re reading the right websites?
DiggerUK, instead of that Spiked / Daily Sceptic political propaganda tripe, here’s a technically competent summary that’s easy to understand:
I’m sure you have read section 3 of your link. It shows less than 5% of output came from gas at the time of the crash.
This clearly shows that there was an availability of gas generation to mitigate, possibly cover, the collapse in supply caused by market forces dictating that renewables output be cut.It most definitely is not the whole story, but it proves that mismanagement of the grid was a major factor. I raise the question again, why was there no attempt to manage a drop off in supply?
Renewables are intermittent; what happened seems to indicate that if nature, not market forces, had reduced supply, there was no plan in place to raise supply from sources such as gas.
I stand by my assertion, that whatever this farrago has revealed, it has shown that nobody knows how to manage the grid…_I’m not going back to plough through the report again, so from memory, an early problem was a 0.2Hz oscillation that might have been originating from a solar photovoltaic station. Various measures were taken to stabilise this, as well as a well known 0.6Hz oscillation. At some point, gas generation was called for, but it couldn’t ‘synchronise’ (i.e. become ready for connection) for (from memory) one and a half to two and a half hours, by which time the blackout had already occurred. I seem to remember a single sentence about some gas-fired and maybe other stations that were already connected that should have complied with “Operating Procedure P.O. 7.4 regarding voltage control service”, but failed to do so.
So yes, “mismanagement of the grid was a major factor”, but there was an “attempt to manage a drop off in supply”.
What is abundantly clear is that a whole load of media outlets have attempted to pin the problem on wind and solar generation, and completely omitted any mention of an apparently perverse market system that called for gas generation when wind and solar were abundant. So from our point of view, the useful information this incident has revealed is which media outlets are doing propaganda against wind and solar.
