“A massive blackout hit Spain and Portugal at midday on Monday, grinding” those countries “to a halt,” reports Euro News. A few people died in accidents or fires as a result. “Chaotic scenes showed families sitting in their homes, lit by candlelight, as traffic was disrupted, thousands were stuck in metro tunnels, businesses shut down, and people were unable to make calls on mobile networks or pay without cash.” Power remained out in much of Spain and Portugal for 18 hours.
The New York Times says Spain’s reliance on renewable energy “may have left it vulnerable” to blackouts:
Spain’s power company, Red Eléctrica, proudly declared on April 16 that enough renewable energy had been generated to cover demand. “The ecological transition is moving forward,” it said.
Less than two weeks later, Spain and Portugal experienced an 18-hour blackout that disrupted daily life, shutting down businesses and schools and crippling trains and mobile networks. Officials have given few details on the cause of the outage.
But the incident exposed how Spain and Portugal, promoted as success stories in Europe’s renewable energy transition, are also uniquely vulnerable to outages….The widespread outage raises questions about the resilience of the power infrastructure in Spain and Portugal — and to an extent, Europe. The two countries have invested heavily in building renewable energy sources like wind turbines and solar farms.
More than half of Spain’s electricity came from renewable energy as of last year, up from about a quarter 15 years ago. That rapid increase has put Spain at the forefront of Europe’s transition to renewable energy…This shift, though, may also have made the grid more prone to the sort of disruption that occurred on Monday. “When you have more renewables on the grid,” Ms. Ramdas said, “then your grid is more sensitive for these kind of disturbances.”
Old-line generation sources like gas turbines and nuclear plants have a spinning momentum known as inertia, which helps buffer the fluctuations that are more common with intermittent sources like wind and solar power.
When the Spanish grid became unstable about midday on Monday, it might have been easier to keep the system functioning if conventional power sources like natural gas or nuclear turbines had a larger presence, analysts say. “This stored rotating energy can help maintain grid frequency until sufficient backup capacity is brought online,” said Henning Gloystein, director for energy at Eurasia Group, a research firm.
The blackout could bolster the argument for retaining conventional generation sources.
Unlike wind and solar power, which can be unreliable and put strain on the grid, nuclear power is reliable and steady, and provides energy even when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.
Nuclear power is the safest form of energy we have, if you consider deaths per megawatt of energy produced,” notes Yale University’s Steven Novella. “Wind turbines, surprisingly, kill more people than nuclear plants,” notes an environmentalist. And “solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste,” such as “dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium.”
Nuclear plants emit no air pollution, only harmless steam. Unlike wind farms, nuclear power plants don’t kill birds. The biggest utility that generates wind power pleaded guilty to federal crimes for killing 150 eagles.
Many years ago, France and Sweden replaced most of their fossil-fueled electricity with nuclear power, and as a result, ended up emitting less than a tenth of the world average of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour. The air in Germany got dirtier because of its hostility to nuclear power. Coal-fired power plants were turned back on to replace nuclear plants that generated no air pollution, but have been closed down. Nuclear power is best for the environment, notes Reason Magazine’s Ronald Bailey. Yet as he observes, “Germany idiotically shut down its last three nuclear power plants” in April 2023. “Until 2011, the country obtained one-quarter of its electricity from 17 nuclear power plants. Shutting down nuclear plants results in more mining of coal, making it harder to protect “natural landscapes.”
