Spanish blackout sparks disinformation

The anti-net zero brigade has swung into action blaming Spain’s huge, country-wide power blackout on Monday on "too much renewable energy in the grid" and declaring net zero to be “sabotage fueled [sic] by sheer stupidity”.

The Spanish far right, already duplicitously using the devastation caused by floods in Valencia in October 2024 to make political gains despite being partially responsible for the mismanagement of local government responses, has been quick to jump on the blackout as proof net zero will create chaos. 

Perhaps the most influential anti-renewable response is built on the journalism of Bloomberg columnist Javier Blas, who has implicitly blamed renewable energy generation, both in scale and in its technical fundamentals, for the blackout.

Inertia

A whole network of posts and media articles have sprung up building on Blas’ posts, connecting everyone from the Daily Mail and Sky News to Reform MP Nigel Farage and MAGA-capitalists Zerohedge.

Blas’ narrative runs something like this. The Spanish energy operator responsible, Red Eléctrica, recorded an initial loss of power for just over one second, likely from a solar array in the Southwest of Spain, which the grid managed to contain. 

There was a second loss of power moments later, from sources unknown, and then, a few seconds after that, the connection between Spanish and French power grids stopped working due to grid instability, after which 60 per cent of the power supply needed in Spain disappeared, causing the blackout.

Blas’ narrative is that the inherent instability of solar power, produced its implied by its lack of inertia, created a shock that caused the connection between France and Spain to breakdown, and pushed the grid to go off-line.

Renewable

The question of inertia is crucial here, as it forms a structural basis for claims renewables will never be capable on their own of powering Europe, or anywhere else.

Energy grids need more than just power supplied to function. One crucial element for large scale grids is what electrical engineers call inertia. 

Grid inertia is a form of energy storage which addresses imbalances between supply and demand on electricity grids over very short time periods, created through the kinetic energy of spinning power station turbines. 

This stored energy helps the grid resist sudden frequency changes caused by imbalances in energy supply and demand. 

One supposed problem with renewables is they don’t produce inertia along with energy. Of course, there are multiple solutions to this, and it’s a well-established aspect of moving across to a renewable energy dominated system. 

Disturbance

And as a large number of energy experts have already pointed out, it’s unlikely that the lack of inertia amongst renewable energy providers in Spain caused the problem.

But that’s not the point. The point of making the blackout a consequence of renewable energy’s lack of inertia is to make renewables structurally incapable of replacing fossil fuels. This means not only will we need nuclear and gas, it means net zero is a destructive policy doomed to fail.

The presentation of this narrative is misleading however, making solar energy the cause of the disruption, and renewables seems structurally unreliable. 

However, increasingly evidence is pointing to a combination of a technical fault and the failings of private energy suppliers as the cause of the blackout.

What we know so far is the disturbance in the grid frequency occurred before the disconnection of power generators. This means solar arrays and wind farms were disconnected after the disturbance took place in order to protect the power plants. 

Surges

There is some indication that would suggest that the primary fault occurred in part of the grid where the connection to the French network is located. 

This fault was generated by a sudden rise and fall in power levels, leading to the connection to France being dropped, leading to a cascade of shutdowns across the grid.

The sudden variability of energy flows is likely due to a combination of two things – a surge in energy coming onto the grid and a technical fault or error with the Spain-France connection.

The Mexican daily La Jornada reports that one of the triggers might be an excess of energy a solar power company was trying to offload onto the grid – an additional 5,000 megawatts – that Spain did not need. 

This may have overloaded the transmission line to France. Indeed, “companies reported that the converters in their photovoltaic systems warned of voltage surges in the grid (overproduction of energy) prior to the disconnection”. 

Sun-rich

This surge likely tripped a system in the interconnection, possibly erroneously, leading to its shutdown.

Yet while the blackout was not caused by inherent issues with renewable energy or ‘net zero madness’, people should highlight the nature of power generation as the problem. 

But the right get the answer wrong. The real problem is the private, for-profit nature of energy generation – not renewables.

Energy companies aim to maximise profits. Their job is not to provide cheap energy, but to make money. Solar energy companies, like any other energy company, wants to maximise profits. 

For companies in sun-rich Spain who end up with a surplus of solar energy, they have to either shut down (curtail) some production or find other buyers.

Consume

Reducing production is expensive, and as profits are often protected in law, can cost a lot of money, meaning there are incentives to try to export or offload energy in excess of Spanish demand. 

The amount of renewable energy ‘curtailed’ reached 1.7 terawatts in 2024, a 13 per cent jump on the year before. Costs for managing this process increased from an average of €390 million between 2017–2020 to €2.5 billion in 2024, adding to the costs of energy operators. 

At the same time, the build out of generation capacity has outstripped investment in the grid and broader energy infrastructure, adding to the strain.

As more capacity has come online, energy prices have fallen – by 20 per cent in just the last three years – with the specter of occasional negative energy price events looming over investors. 

A negative price event occurs when there is so much energy available on the market companies will pay for you to consume it rather than curtail production. Such events typically lead to backlashes from ‘traditional’ energy producers such as coal and nuclear generators. 

Infrastructural

More broadly, low prices produce low profits, and as Brett Christophers has outlined, profits are what drives the energy market, and is ultimately responsible for the lack of investment in energy infrastructure. 

The drive for profit also has led to insufficient connections between the Spanish and French grids, one of the triggers of the blackout. The EU has an interconnection target of 15 per cent of installed generation capacity, but the Spain-France interconnection only amounts to three percent. 

This is not only because its difficult and expensive to build connections. A big part of the reason why more capacity hasn’t been built is because French energy companies want protection from cheap Spanish solar energy. As in Spain itself, companies don’t want competition, they want the certainty of profits. 

While the right is mobilizing to declare the blackout proof renewables are inherently bad, the reality is profit-driven energy systems create hardship and crisis.

One of the first theories that circulated was the blackout was caused by a weather anomaly. This has since been discredited but the idea that climate change was the cause of social and infrastructural breakdown is far from ridiculous. 

Rage

Storms already shut down energy systems while drought causes both nuclear and hydro power plants to shut down from France to Zimbabwe. 

Extreme temperatures drive up energy usage for both heating and air conditioning, while water shortages compel governments to install energy-hungry desalination plants. High temperatures also make power generation and transmission less efficient and energy systems prone to faults and shutdowns. 

A chaotic, profit-led transition adds to these risks but putting increasing strain on essential systems, where companies focus on those areas that maximise profits, while neglecting the more expensive yet critical elements of our shared infrastructure.

Part of the paradox of our hotter world is that it is the political far right that is cashing in on climate disruption, while denying it even exists and decrying the efforts being made to mitigate it as a conspiracy to make us poorer. 

Already as small businesses go bankrupt, lives are lost and blackouts become common, the political right are successfully combining anti-incumbent rage and conspiracy theories to build their power base through climate chaos. 

The cruel irony is, as their track record in power shows, their gains will only make the problem worse.

This Author

Nicholas Beuret is a lecturer at the University of Essex researching the politics and political economy of climate change and the green transition. His book Or Something Worse: Why we ned to disrupt the climate transition is out with Verso in September 2025.