The immediate cause of the sudden drop in power in Spain that preceded the shutdown may or may not have been caused by the country’s addiction to renewables.
In the most recent Capital Letter, I have written about the Iberian “greenout,” in all probability a fair description of the recent massive power failure in Spain and Portugal. The immediate cause of the sudden drop in power in Spain that preceded the shutdown may or may not have been caused by the country’s addiction to renewables (although the best guess is that it was). Time will tell, hopefully.
However, the fact that the sudden loss in power led to the shutdown of the entire Spanish grid (and that of the luckless Portuguese, who are connected to it) seems to be related to the way that when renewables pass a certain percentage of the electricity generated, they effectively weaken a grid’s resilience. There are some workarounds to deal, in whole or in part, with that, but they were not in place in sufficient quantity in Spain, something that can, at least partly, be explained by the fanaticism with which Madrid was (and still is) pursuing its net zero goal, a goal determined by politics, rather than physics or by what is (for now) practical.
This is not a new phenomenon. To quote, well, myself:
[C]entral planning almost never works. The directives went out putting speed (“five years in four,” as the early Soviet planners urged) ahead of practicality. As so often with Soviet-style schemes, they were out of sync, just as they were with electric vehicles, built before problems with charging technology and availability had been sorted out. Wind and solar energy are essentially modular, fairly quick to put up (if local objections can be swept out of the way) and relatively cheap. By contrast, upgrading the grid is slow and expensive. The new generating equipment (wind turbines and solar panels) was being installed before the grid was ready to take it, and in Spain the mismatch was greater than elsewhere in Europe.
Some of the accounts of the greenout made thought-provoking reading (more on that to come), but one detail took me by surprise, mainly, I suppose, because I had never thought it through. Being a prepper in New York City can only be taken so far (sadly).
When the electricity suddenly went out in Spain on Monday, Irene Casas and her husband Luis Morate, who live in an apartment building in a Madrid suburb, lost power along with everyone else. That’s despite the fact that they, along with their neighbors, own a source of electricity: 200 rooftop solar panels installed at the end of 2023.
The panels didn’t help them ride out the blackout because they are connected directly to the grid. Each co-owner, including Casas and Morate and their neighbors, gets a discount on their utility bill in exchange for the power they put into the electricity network, but the panels themselves don’t directly supply their apartments with energy.
Now that I do think about it, that does make sense, but:
The predicament may have come as a surprise to some of the thousands of Spanish households who now have rooftop solar. The number of installations on homes surged after 2018 when a tax on using energy from panels was canceled. Since then, residential solar capacity has shot up from 300 megawatts to 2,400 megawatts by the end of 2023, according to BloombergNEF data.
In most cases, that rooftop solar is connected to the grid. Going self-sufficient is too complicated (the explanatory how-to guide in Spain is a modest 181 pages long) for most. According to Bloomberg, it’s a similar story elsewhere in Europe.
Most solar installations in Europe, even those with batteries, are not equipped with so-called islanding capabilities, which enable them to operate when the grid is down. Instead, the inverter — the device which acts as the brain of the solar system — turns it off the system when the grid is not available. That’s for safety reasons and to allow engineers to work on the grid without encountering live wires.
It costs more to set up solar panels so they can quickly switch off the grid.
And so, being used to reliable energy (something that may change) most Europeans don’t think it’s worth their while. At a guess, that will also be the case in the U.S., but less so, given how much of this country is sparsely populated — and our far higher use of overhead power lines. The storms can be rougher here, too. Above all, this is America, a land where more people believe that “islanding” is the right thing to do, the country of Burt and Heather Gummer, the true hero and heroine of Tremors, out on their own and well equipped, both psychologically and in terms of hardware, to defend their rec room when the enemy came calling.