Hours later, rescue workers arrive to extract you and your fellow passengers from the stalled train. You make your way to the street in hopes of taking a taxi or an Uber. But without your phone apps and with credit card machines inoperable, you are forced to search for an ATM – only to discover those aren’t working, either.
You soon realize that everyone else is in the same predicament. Hospitals operating on emergency backup systems. People trapped inside elevators. Traffic snarled due to inoperable stoplights. Gas station pumps not functioning. Airport terminals closed. People in darkened homes desperately searching for candles and battery-operated radios to learn what’s happening.
On April 28, the residents of Spain, Portugal and parts of France didn’t have to try to imagine this nightmare scenario. They found themselves prisoners of it for hours when an unprecedented blackout impacted at least 55 million people after the Iberian Peninsula electric grid system failed.
The outage, described as one of the worst ever in Europe, “disrupted businesses, hospitals, transit systems, cellular networks and other critical infrastructure,” according to the France 24 news channel.
Many news agencies, particularly in the U.S., insisted for days that it was too early to say what caused the massive blackout. Others, though, acknowledged the obvious. The Reuters news agency reported early on, “Redeia, which owns Red Electrica, warned in February in its annual report that it faced a risk of ‘disconnections due to the high penetration of renewables without the technical capacities necessary for an adequate response in the face of disturbances.’”
While many observers did their best to point fingers at alternative causes, others were more straightforward in identifying the culprit.
Raúl Bajo Buenestado is a nonresident energy scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston. He received a Fulbright scholarship as a graduate student and a grant for young researchers from Spain’s Ministry of Education, and received his Ph.D. in economics from Rice. Currently, he is “primarily working on the generation investment incentives and capacity markets in the electricity sector. He also conducts research on gasoline retail markets,” according to his online biography.
After studying the April 28 blackout data, Buenestado authored a commentary concluding that mere minutes prior to the grid collapse, “renewable sources accounted for 78% of electricity generation in the Iberian Peninsula grid system, with solar alone contributing nearly 60%. By contrast, conventional technologies, such as gas-fired and nuclear power plants, comprised only around 15% of the total generation mix. This configuration is not unusual in Spain or Portugal, where high shares of renewable generation are common, particularly during sunny and windy days.”
Buenestado added, “What sets April 28 apart, however, is that, according to Spain’s national electricity grid operator (Red Eléctrica de España), two consecutive generation loss events occurred in southwestern Spain, likely involving large solar installations.”
Buenestado noted that “the risk of large-scale blackouts in electricity systems with high shares of renewable energy is well-established. However, the Iberian blackout of April 28 brings these long-recognized vulnerabilities into sharp focus.” He explained that unlike conventional power plants, solar and wind installations “depend on a stable grid to function correctly and cannot autonomously support grid stability during disturbances.”
Before President Trump reversed the previous administration’s war on fossil fuels, President Biden had committed the U.S. to reaching “100% clean electricity” by 2035 – a goal that seriously imperiled our own infrastructure. Biden’s corresponding attacks on affordable and reliable energy sources like natural gas were unrealistic and unpopular with many consumers who preferred gas appliances and heating sources over those that would be allowable under federal mandates.
Likewise, Spain is “currently aiming to phase out fossil fuel and nuclear generation in favor of renewables,” with a goal of renewables comprising 74% of total output by 2030, under the plan.
The insistence on replacing affordable, dependable energy with more expensive and unreliable alternatives is both illogical and impractical. Natural gas remains the most cost-effective, reliable and increasingly clean fuel choice in the world.
It is telling that despite the Spanish government’s anti-fossil fuel rhetoric, the U.S. recently became the main supplier of liquefied natural gas to Spain. Much of Europe – mimicking extremist climate change rhetoric – publicly decries America’s continued production and use of traditional energy, while simultaneously gobbling it up.
Will the disaster of April 28 make European leaders think twice about abandoning our most reliable energy sources? Hardly. Following the devastating blackout, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said his government would not “deviate a single millimeter” from its plans to transition to so-called renewables.
That’s unfortunate. In the meantime, it is worth noting that one of the primary sources of energy used to restore electricity to the tens of millions in Spain, Portugal and parts of France who lost power was one that officials there claim to abhor – natural gas.
Gary Abernathy is a longtime newspaper editor, reporter and columnist. He was a contributing columnist for the Washington Post from 2017-2023 and a frequent guest analyst across numerous media platforms. He is a contributing columnist for The Empowerment Alliance, which advocates for realistic approaches to energy consumption and environmental conservation.