According to the Telegraph the Iberian Peninsula’s catastrophic power outage on April 28th 2025 was most likely down to failures at solar farms.
REE, Spain’s national grid operator, said it had identified two incidents of power generation loss, probably from solar plants, in the country’s south-west.
These incidents caused instability in the electric system and led to a breakdown of its interconnection with France.
It has ruled out a cyber attack as the cause.
In a statement on Tuesday afternoon, Pedro Sanchez, the Spanish Prime Minister, said the blackout was not due to a lack of nuclear power, rejecting claims by far-Right party Vox which opposes Madrid’s planned nuclear phase-out.
“Those who link this incident to the lack of nuclear power are frankly lying or demonstrating their ignorance.”
Mr Sanchez announced that a commission has been set up and that “all the necessary measures will be taken to ensure that this does not happen again”.
The Guardian was still running with the idea that the weather was to blame first thing this morning but by later in the day had dropped the story entirely, though its Politics Live section did cover Tony Blair’s warning today that phasing out fossil fuel is doomed to failure:
Tony Blair has called for a “reset” of action on climate change, to the dismay of some green campaigners, suggesting the Government should focus less on renewables and more on technological solutions like carbon capture.
In remarks that have antagonised some in Labour and in industry, the former prime minister said people were “being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal”.
Blair, who was writing the forward to a new report from his thinktank, the Tony Blair Institute, echoed similar criticism of Net Zero made by the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. He wrote “any strategy based on either ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.”
The former Labour leader, whose institute has been highly influential in Labour circles, said that the current climate debate was “riven with irrationality” and suggested Net Zero was losing public support.
Blair added: “Most political leaders are decent people who do want to do the right thing. … They would like to start taking some of the hysteria out of the climate debate but are reluctant to be the first to do so.”
Meanwhile, the BBC remained circumspect and stuck with running a story covering the disruption in detail.
The whole extraordinary incident impacted almost the whole Iberian Peninsula and even parts of France. But two factors are going to have to be under consideration:
- Our dependence on electricity has increased dramatically, and that dependence is being ramped up as other power sources are being gradually eliminated.
- The new sources of electricity are subject to uncontrollable variations in supply, and which cannot be easily synchronised with demand, with a disastrous susceptibility to causing whole grids to switch off.
If nothing else, the Iberian Peninsula fiasco has flagged up like nothing before just how vulnerable our society is, especially when massive changes to something as important as the power grid are forced through in a rush. The implications for Britain, where the present Government is desperate to make the whole nation totally reliant on renewable sources of electricity generation by 2030, are very serious indeed.
It’s also shown how very quickly a further blackout, especially one which cannot be solved almost immediately, could lead to disorder on the streets and potentially far worse. The political implications ought to be obvious, even to the most stupid and short-sighted politicians.
The Telegraph’s piece is worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Net Zero taxes are killing manufacturing, failing to tackle emissions and making Britain more reliant on foreign imports, Sir Jim Ratcliffe has warned. From the Telegraph:
The billionaire industrialist said costly taxes on carbon emissions were driving jobs offshore and simply shifting production to countries that cared less about the environment.
The Chief Executive of chemicals giant Ineos urged Ministers to rethink the UK’s carbon taxes, which he said cost him tens of millions of pounds each year that would otherwise be ploughed into investment.
Sir Jim warned the collapse of British Steel laid bare the damage done by Britain’s ideological and “uncompetitive energy policy”, which he said was putting UK companies out of business.
Read here.
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In the great Physics Lab up in the sky, Professor Richard Feynman will be smiling wryly. As concluded in the report of the 1987 Presidential Commission into the Challenger space-shuttle disaster…
“…For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.“
True. Though – you will take this medicine whether you want to or not, and it will not cure you anyway is not really “public relations” `😏😏
Easily predictable.
Aren’t the same group of morons trying to ‘dim the sun’ through geo-engineering?
Truly clown world in overdrive.
Meanwhile hydrocarbons as abiotic energy can form in years. Entirely renewable.
Abiotic energy? Is that a thing?
Lots of people think it is. I don’t generally like quoting Wikipedia, but here is an article about it, although Wikipedia does what Wikipedia does and repeats the established doctrine, in this case that oil and gas come from dead creatures, something which even from an early age I thought sounded implausible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
When clouds cross the sky, output from solar panel falter and fluctuate, in the same way that changes in airflow cause output from wind turbines to fluctuate.
This cause frequency fluctuations which cause grid shutdown.
Weather-dependent electricity generators do that. Surprise!
Looking on the bright side, it’s keeping some branches of academia busy: https://www.ieee-jas.net/en/article/doi/10.1109/JAS.2024.125013 This one is on the topic of instability, rate of change of frequency etc.
And clouds move quicker than the wind changes and the peak risk to the grid will be when solar panels are at maximum output in the middle of the day. Just remind me again what time the grid collapsed.
Tony Blair wading in – clearly he’s on manoeuvres. What’s he after?
Perhaps they want to ditch the net zero nonsense without making it look like a u turn? Too much of a coincidence that he comes right after the blackout…
And just before the local elections where the public will give their verdict.
Local elections? What local elections? Denied to us here in Essex by the government, on the pretext that there will soon be a reorganisation of our local authority, making elections a pointless exercise. The more cynical locals see it more as a strategy to stop us expressing our disgust at what Labour’s doing in government by voting for anyone else.
Wants to be Klaus’s successor doesn’t he at the WEF?
Still pushing shit like carbon capture though.
Until the “CO2 is bad” meme is dead and buried there’ll be no salvation.
Money for his new carbon capture venture.
Could just be that he is a complete tosser? Simple answer is often the correct one.
That *almost* goes without saying… he doesn’t do or say anything unless there is a quid in it for him, he out Tory’d the Tories when he was in office
Dunno, but for a change he is right on this one
Whilst Blair’s conclusions are broadly ok, the logic he uses to get there is poor. I think he says it the way he thinks voters might listen, rather than by analysing the facts and stating them
A politician’s gambit there.
It’s sickening to see how people like Blair who spend all their time pontificating to the rest of society thinks he can turn on a dime and hope that everyone either doesn’t realise or forgets that 10 minutes ago he was aggressively advocating the opposite and that he helped create the hysteria he now denounces.
He and George Soros agreed all this in April 1996.
More sickening is the amount of money that Tony The Liar receives for what appears to be nothing of use whatsoever.
“Most political leaders are decent people who do want to do the right thing…”
Really, Tony? Well thanks for clearing that up for us… 😫
I just thew caution to the wind and ventured over to http://www.bbc for this subject. Not been there for nearly 10 years. I hoped for the best but found the worst. It’s like a bad stand up comic’s description of why life is shit. Utter drivel, made up nonsense, and stated facts that are conjured out of thin air with no evidence whatsoever. It will be another 10 years at least before I return.
The War Criminal is all in favour of carbon capture.
It would be a very good idea therefore to check whether Blair has financial “interests” in the carbon capture SCAM.
Given the deafening silence from the BBC and Miliband I think we can safely assume that the Spanish blackout is a direct result of Net Zero policies. Sometimes it’s not what you say, it’s what….
Who would have known? ——–Everyone who isn’t brainwashed with phony planet saving propaganda and who know a little, bit about energy. ——Mainly that you cannot run Industrial Society on sun and wind. But the tragedy is that our UN and WEF lackey politicians do not care. All they are concerned about is following instructions from the phony planet saving technocrats and ignoring their own citizens who actually voted for them. —–PS Tony Blair already said 6 months ago that nothing we do here regarding ne Zero will make the slightest difference to global climate. But ofcourse anyone who knows anything about this issue does not need Tony to tell them. But when a left wing look up to person like Blair turns against net Zero then Miliband is in a spot of bother.
My apologies for posting this again, but I do think this article makes an important point:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dfleming/p/the-long-game-of-tony-blair-from?r=ylgqf&utm_medium=ios
We might have guessed – if that evil skank Blair has anything to say on the subject.
Thanks for the link.
NetZero cannot and will not ever work
https://richardlyon.substack.com/p/the-physics-of-net-zero
Being “asked” to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle? If only.
Anyone know what Blair thinks about the recent sun dimming nonsense?
In the midst of all this, there’s good news for China, Russia, and anyone else who wants to weaken western nations: they don’t need to worry anymore about sabotaging our power grids, because we’re doing that ourselves by building in vulnerability in the form of intermittent renewables. They just have to sit back and wait for the chaos to arise.
So Spain is ending nuclear power. It’s not about low carbon energy, it’s about less energy. Blair is the consummate politician, he has not changed any of his opinions, he just knows when to row back a little bit.