Lessons From Spain and Portugal About Solar Power | Political News
By H. Sterling Burnett.
The countrywide energy outage Spain and Portugal skilled this week, which also shut down elements of France, is a highly effective lesson in the hazards of relying on renewable energy, in this case, particularly photo voltaic, for grid-scale electric provision.
We in the United States have had previews of this over the previous decade, with common outages being skilled each summer time in California, America’s chief in authorities mandated wind and photo voltaic use, and in my home state of Texas, where a winter outage – not peak energy season in Texas by the way in which – killed more than 200 people. The major cause for the Texas energy failure was the large, fast drop-off in politically favored wind and solar energy delivered to the grid.
Spain and Portugal, even more than the remainder of Europe, went all in on renewable vitality, closing dependable conventional energy plants and changing them with industrial wind and photo voltaic services in the useless quest to control the climate. According to EuroWeekly, “[o]n April 16, 2025, Spain celebrated a green energy triumph. In a historic achievement, Spain’s national grid was powered entirely by renewable energy on Tuesday, April 16 – the first time this has ever happened on a weekday.”
Spain also bragged about going one hundred pc renewable on April 22 and April 28, minutes before the systemwide, multi-country energy failure. Then, as EuroWeekly reported, “Just twelve days later, the lights went out across the entire country.”
The vitality systems’ respective regulatory authorities rapidly ruled out cyber terrorism. Portugal’s regulator rapidly posited that the outage was a outcome of a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” creating instability along the facility strains.
Related: Spain, Portugal Plunged Into Darkness Amid Widespread Blackouts—What’s the Cause?
The regulators, utility officers, and politicians knew or ought to have recognized that their pressured insertion of huge quantities of intermittent photo voltaic and wind energy onto the system was to blame.
“The underlying physics had been understood for years, and the specific vulnerabilities had been spelled out repeatedly in technical warnings that policymakers ignored,” wrote U.S. vitality analyst Michael Shellenberger in a post on the occasion. “In 2017, ENTSO-E, the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity, published a major report [that] concluded that the risk of cascading failures across Europe would increase unless governments invested heavily in synthetic inertia, large-scale storage, and smarter real-time grid management.
“In 2022, a team of researchers modeled the Spanish grid with large use of wind and solar and warned that, without significant investments in flexibility and inertia-providing technologies, the grid’s stability would be at risk,” Shellenberger continued.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright will get it. In an April 28 look on CNBC, he stated, “It’s very sad to see what’s happened to Portugal and Spain and so many people there. But you know, when you hitch your wagon to the weather, it’s just a risky endeavor.”
It was worse than dangerous—it was lethal. People died as a outcome of the facility failure.
The issues with solar energy are starting to daybreak on legislators in some states. One invoice being thought-about in Texas would impose a uniform reliability or firming requirement for all mills. The invoice would also require renewable energy sources to pay for their volatility.
Louisiana is also concurrently taking part in catch-up while wanting forward. Louisiana state Rep. Brett Geymann (R-Lake Charles), chairman of the House Natural Resources and Environment committee, has launched a invoice that would tremendously scale back the hurt posed by future industrial photo voltaic services. Among different issues, the invoice gives provisions to shield wildlife and farmland, to forestall visible impairment or nuisance, and to guarantee that photo voltaic services are accountable cradle-to-grave for the disposal of their waste. Neither parishes nor the state needs to be accountable for disposing of piles of toxin-filled photo voltaic panels.
To be clear, in my opinion, industrial solar energy is a hazard to the setting, the facility grid, ratepayers, and taxpayers, and accordingly has no place in a trendy energy system. Proponents of renewable vitality tout it as half of a multi-layered vitality strategy – “all of the above” place. I reject this in favor of all that is reasonably priced, dependable, and clean.
The Heartland Institute lately revealed two stories, “Affordable, Reliable, and Clean: An Objective Scorecard to Assess Competing Energy Sources,” and “How States Can Push Back Against the Destructive Expansion of Industrial Solar Power.” These stories show that solar energy fails on all three of those metrics, being the most costly and tied for the least dependable source of electric energy era, and, on an all issues thought-about environmental foundation, solar energy will not be even clean.
On a Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity foundation, accounting for subsidies and the prices of different energy sources needed to backup, complement, and regulate solar energy, it’s the most costly source of electric energy – 10 instances more costly than natural gasoline on a megawatt per hour foundation, and larger than 4 instances more costly than coal.
Aside from value and reliability issues, industrial photo voltaic services destroy both wildlife habitat and productive farmland. Habitat conversion is the most important killer of wildlife and industrial photo voltaic requires roughly 60 sq. miles of photo voltaic panels to produce the identical quantity of energy as a standard energy plant, even after mining and transmission are accounted for.
As if that will not be enough, industrial photo voltaic services create big end-of-life waste issues, are dependent upon youngster and slave labor, and as the market is at the moment configured, put the United States at the mercy of China for vital minerals, metallic, elements, and completed merchandise.
Is it actually a good thought for the United States to develop into beholden to China for its vitality security when we have now a secure, plentiful provide of fossil fuels and uranium?
In short, increasing industrial solar energy anyplace in the United States serves no helpful function. Adding more industrial photo voltaic to the grid threatens to make massive, multi-state energy outages, like those lately seen in Spain and Portugal, foreseeable and common. In his track, “War,” Edwin Starr once sang, “War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, say it again!” The identical may very well be sung from the rooftops about industrial photo voltaic, “Solar, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, say it again!”
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., ([email protected]) is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit analysis group primarily based in Arlington Heights, Illinois.
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