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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The sad thing is that a so called liberal judge would have ruled the opposite. Everything is politicised, especially the judicial system. This just hardens the battle.
The Dems won’t look at this and go, oh wow our government did what? They will see it as an attack on them and figure out how to retaliate.
True. What seems to me to have changed is that the consensus within which politics took place has broken down, under attack from the left. We need new countries – I can see no common ground.
Quite so – and when that happens the long term result is civil war. We are gradually learning – yet again – that democracy only functions within a consensus; and that the breadth of that consensus depends in turn on toleration – not approval – but explicitly the permission we give to others to be wrong.
The left withholds that permission, at first through informal means of ostracism, hectoring, bullying and worse; and at last through rafts of oppressive law.
This would be bad enough in isolation, but the left – thorough-going agent of decay that it is – has introduced into society such a disunited agglomeration of ethno-cultural groups, in which it has actively fostered such resentment, bigotry and hatred, that any civil conflict in the west will be more than tinged with racial hatred.
They have done this from a variety of motives, but we can have little doubt that lurking down at the bottom of the toxic mix lies a Marxist will towards the annihilation of civil life in the west.
A single encounter with any of those touting the various lies which sustain the left’s position will demonstrate this point conclusively. They offer fake statistics, skewed history and tendentious reasoning; exposed on such points, they stoop at once to insult and denigration until – at last – if forced into acknowledging their real views, they stand exposed as hate-filled mystics, inviting the apocalypse.
The trouble is that many of them have been sucked into this whirlpool of unreason and hate from moralistic motives – virtue becomes vanity, degrades into shame and ends as puritan rage. And pride prevents retreat.
Bloody hell, you have a cracking turn of phrase, Rumpo…
Today’s YouGov chat:
“Government aims to end smoking by 2030, give us your views”
Even Winston Smith was allowed Victory Gin.
Never in the history of humanity have authoritarian leaders survived and these won’t either.
“Socialism” only ever gets remotely close to working when it is imposed by force – this principle has led to the the tactic of indoctrinating people (the intended enforcers) through the educational system.
Very true. Indeed, it can only be sustained by force since neither human instinct nor abstract reasoning justifies its claims. It is, in short, a sustained moralistic lie imposed by screeching prigs in a state of advanced insanity. People find this hard to believe, in spite of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and all the other scum, because we are hard-wired to assume rationality in our fellow men; but in thousands of ways and on thousands of occasions, human society has succumbed to mass psychosis and millenarian preening – perhaps, as Pascal suggested, because otherwise we might – quite simply – grow bored. The emptiness of the poor human head and our lack of appetite for sustained effort are, in combination, the origin of almost all our self-inflicted disasters.
Even force fails eventually, as the Ceaucescus found out. I’ll help to build the gallows, should I still be alive
I like to think that too. But then I remember the Kim dynasty in North Korea and the CCP in China and realise that it can go on for a very long time.
The left have become absolutely deranged. “Cluck, cluck, jibber, jibber, my old man’s a mushroom” deranged. I think they know they’re responsible for the sh*tshow we’re living in, but instead of behaving sensibly and start rowing back on stuff, they’re doubling down, putting their hands over their ears and shouting “LAH, LAH, LAH, I can’t hear you!!”, like a petulant child. That’s the main problem with the left (the current middle class left, not the old working class left which has been destroyed), they have no ability to think ahead. They think in the now, not the then, and refuse to understand why something they demanded hasn’t turned out as they wanted. Again, like children.
I have a little test. If someone opposes my views, I ask if they could be devils advocate for me, could they argue for my point of view.? Obviouly they can’t because they have never thought about my point of view, only their own. Only by trying to see both sides can you make a reasoned judgement of for or against.
Yes, it’s incredibly important to listen to both sides – even more so if you passionately disagree with one side. Some of the articles I enjoy reading the most are the ones that run counter to my own belief system. Only by considering other points of view can you gain real confidence in your own opinion. Without doing that you’re just living in an echo chamber. Surprised by the number of downvotes you got tbh. Oh well.
Downvotes.? I take them as a badge of honour…
I’ve tried that exact same thing on several occasions. I usually go first and find I pretty much nail their viewpoint. And then they fail miserably. Always. Never fails.
Given that the cornerstone of democracy in the US lies in the first amendment and the right to freedom of speech, without the threat of censorship, I’ve always struggled to reconcile that with philosopher Karl Popper’s ‘paradox of tolerance’: which states that “in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.” Essentially, if a so-called tolerant society permits the existence of intolerant philosophies, it is no longer tolerant. I bet sleepy Joe lies awake at night pondering this.
As the right-thinking’septics’ would say, “Let’s go Brandon.”
So the Biden administration is authoritarian and used the 3 letter agency to enforce its authoritarian policies. Imagine my surprise.