And, yes, it absolutely was the result of their switch to the Luddite "renewables" like solar and wind. From the Scuttlebut substack:
If you haven’t heard, Spain was quite proud that they hit 100% renewable power (wind, solar and hydro.) on the 16th of April. Something they bragged about excessively. Now one of the things I’m very familiar with, and quite good at, is electrical systems; whether electronic, electrical, power generation, or storage: it’s a field I worked in for decades. Of the three “renewable” energy sources, (by the way, nuclear is renewable too, but the watermelons don’t like that one) only one is truly reliable. Hydro. Wind is literally: at the mercy of the wind. Solar can be dramatically curtailed by dust, clouds, and of course, nightfall. Hydro can only be messed with by politicians who are worried about how the salmon will spawn and such.
Everything but hydro requires power conditioners, converters (solar generates DC power, most wind power does too) and battery storage, against the times when the source falls off… In short, it’s a far more complex system, with more moving parts, and more ways to go wrong, when compared to hydro, nuke, and fossil fuel plants.
Spain got to learn that just twelve days after their bragging session, when one of the solar farms went into frequency oscillation (remember I said it generates DC and turns it into AC, the system is more complex, and more computerized.Was this a cyber-attack, or a failure of either software or hardware? No one knows yet.) Automatic safeties kicked in and took this farm off line, which caused a cascade failure.
End result? The entire Iberian Peninsula blacked out for over a day, and things still not fully back up. The cell phones continued to work for at least a while, because the towers have batteries and emergency diesel generators… Same thing for the hospitals, though they had to use the Army to escort fuel trucks to the hospitals to keep the generators running. Everything else, from radio and tv stations, traffic lights, household power, airports (runway lights, internal lights, air traffic control radios and radars) all of it: including all of their trains, because guess what? They’re all electric too.
Spain of course, is doubling down on “this had nothing to do with renewables, look, our nuclear plants went down too.” This of course ignores the fact that there are systems in the nuke plants that shut them down if there’s a problem with the grid… France’s grid, which is set to divorce itself from Spain’s in the event of a catastrophic failure on the Spanish side, and which is mostly nuclear, did not go down…
Bringing the grid back up from “black” is far more challenging with mostly solar and wind, because they need power to run the stuff that makes power. (like your car needs a charged battery to start and to run the spark plugs until the alternator can take the load.) Contrarily, a fossil fuel generator can fire up, and bring the little section of the grid around it back up, which powers the big breakers to bring more of it up, and so on. A nuke needs either battery or a diesel to get up and running, then it can behave like a fossil fuel plant. To date, solar and wind can not be part of the “bring it up from black” piece.
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