‘Net Zero Madness’: Spain’s Reliance on Solar Energy Blamed For Massive Nations-Wide Power Cut

Spain’s power network has remained silent on the actual cause of Europe’s worst power blackout in a generation, but has acknowledged that it is “very possible” that a problem with solar power systems may have contributed to the failure.

A freak weather incident was blamed on Monday for a massive power cut that affected the entire Iberian Peninsula, depriving Spain and Portugal of electricity. However, this narrative was quickly questioned by energy industry insiders, and Spain’s national energy company now acknowledges that renewable power failure may have been a contributing factor.

Red Eléctrica (RE), the national energy grid firm, has stated that it has ruled out a cyberattack and insists, “We were able to conclude that there was indeed no intrusion into Red Eléctrica’s control system,” despite the national counter-terrorism prosecutor ordering an inquiry. Judge José Luis Calama has given RE and the national cyber-security centre ten days to compile initial reports into the sabotage hypothesis, reports El País.

While the Spanish media is today full of the effects of yesterday’s total blackout, with 150,000 having to be rescued from underground trains trapped in tunnels and whole areas, including hospitals, left without water as the electric-powered pumps fell silent, the public unable to buy food and drink unless they had ready cash to hand, and telephone and internet networks being rendered non-functional, less is being said about how the crisis began.

The starry sky is visible in the city of Granada, Spain, on April 28, 2025, with the City Hall during the power outage that affects Spain nationwide. (Photo by Fermin Rodriguez/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Bloomberg energy industry journalist Javier Blas, who is Spanish, stated he had received the RE timeline on how power fluctuations caused a cascading failure that disconnected the whole Peninsula and millions of people from electricity, but noted caustically that “I find very difficult to believe that the Spanish government doesn’t have by now a rough idea of the origin of the blackout… [there is] silence about the causes of the worst blackout in living memory in Europe.”

Blas related that, per RE, there had been two “events” that had been “akin to loss of power generation” within one and a half seconds of each other. While the grid was able to self-stabilise after the first, it could not resist the second, leading to a cascade failure, including the loss of the France-Spain power interconnector.

Incredibly, it was revealed that earlier statements from RE that there had been some power generation still available on Monday in Spain had been mistaken. At the “worst point of the blackout, Iberian Peninsula generation did fall to zero”, meaning that two whole European countries had no energy being supplied to their national grids whatsoever for the best part of a day.

As noted by Blas, RE remains silent on the actual causes of those “events” but it is reported Tuesday morning that the network has acknowledged it is “plausible” the cause was a sudden loss of solar power at a time when it was supporting 70 per cent of national demand, causing the whole system to stall.

One of the owners of a hardware store serves his customers with flashlights during the power outage that affects Spain nationwide in Granada, Spain (Photo by Fermin Rodriguez/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

A street lies in darkness except for the light from passing cars (Photo by MIGUEL RIOPA/AFP via Getty Images)

Spain has one of the greenest power systems in the world, and just this month, it celebrated powering the entire Iberian Peninsula — the south-western part of Europe, primarily covered by Spain and Portugal — with only renewable energy. Like many European countries, left-wing Spain has been busy demolishing its conventional power plants and is even, like Germany, decommissioning its nuclear power fleet.

Just last week, Spain signalled that it was open to reconsidering the rush to phase out nuclear amid global energy insecurity, indicating that the government had already realised it was going too far, too fast with total renewables.

Energy consultant Kathryn Porter, one of those who early on questioned the initial claims that the outage may have been caused by freak atmospheric conditions —  “unusual meteorological or atmospheric phenomenon”, force majeure in other words and a handy means of avoiding blame — didn’t go so far as to say the cause had been a cyber attack but said it was “certainly possible”. As noted by Spain’s national telecoms company in 2022, Spain is one of the most-targeted countries for cyberattacks in the world.

Yet more critical, Porter said, was that Spain’s rush for solar and wind had made the power network more fragile because, without system inertia and redundancy, it is susceptible to shock.

In this case, as Porter stated, inertia isn’t metaphorical: traditional power networks are kept synchronised and insulated against shock by the literal inertia produced by the enormous spinning metal of turbines and generators inside power stations. Solar power, which has no moving parts, does not contribute to this at all, and wind turbines have much smaller generators with less inertial energy.

It is this lack of inertia in the Spanish and Portuguese renewable-heavy system that may have allowed what could have been a local blackout to spread to the whole network, with oscillations in the system causing power inputs — like power stations, solar arrays, and even energy import interconnectors — to automatically disconnect themselves to prevent severe damage to their equipment.

A report on the importance of inertia in a functioning power grid cited by Porter in turn quoted the United Kingdom’s National Grid Electricity System Operator, who explained in 2022: “Operating the system with low inertia will continue to represent a key operational challenge into the future and we will need to ensure we improve our understanding of the challenges this will bring”.

That report, published by a supplier of clutches for power stations, noted: “Renewable generation is increasingly displacing conventional generation in the generation mix, reducing the amount of heavy, rotating turbines on the grid and therefore the amount of inertia they provide.”

These fragilities are not unknown to the electricity industry, and much has been written on the challenges of transition to renewable power. Yet Bloomberg’s Blas wrote just last week that it has only been comparatively recently that the green energy lobby has even acknowledged such problems, having taken the position in the past that any criticism of green energy systems was motivated by cynicism and ideological opposition, rather than what he called “electricity realism” and real concern about grid resilience.

He wrote last week:

…[the risk is] matching a demand that requires 24/7 supply with a generation system that, at the margin, depends today on whether the sun is shining and the wind is blowing… It’s unclear how the grid will work when the weather isn’t helping. That’s a reality that the IEA — and renewable advocates — have long downplayed. It’s refreshing that’s now acknowledged openly.

As splashed by Spanish conservative newspaper El Mundo this morning, Red Eléctrica itself warned its shareholders that the shift to an all-renewable power model, as being pursued, “increases the risk of operational incidents,” blaming “regulator requirements” for the closures of traditional power. Nevertheless, when this warning reached the ears of the public and RE were questioned by the press, the company insisted, “There is no risk of blackout” because “Red Eléctrica guarantees the supply”.

Naturally, political attention throughout Europe has turned to the Iberian blackout, particularly as left-leaning governments strive to catch up with Spain in what they call decarbonising their own energy grids. In the United Kingdom, where the government says it wants to reach “Net Zero carbon emissions” by 2050 and wants to achieve this without importing slave-labour-linked solar panels from China, Green Great Reset sceptics have spoken out on the need for a pause and rethink in the light of this week’s events.

Brexit’s Nigel Farage, who is already styling himself as a Prime Minister in waiting and who is cruising towards what pollsters say may be a convincing election victory in nationwide local government contests this week, said on Tuesday morning that “the power outage in Spain is a warning”. The United Kingdom is dangerously reliant on foreign energy imports, he said, stating: “This net zero madness must end”.