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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