Predictable as clockwork, some people are blaming renewables for yesterday's massive electricity blackout in Spain and Portugal (and some parts of Southern France). "Net zero blamed for blackout chaos" blared a headline in Britain's Daily Telegraph, for example, even though various experts interviewed in the article did NOT in fact come to that conclusion.
It happens every time, but, just as predictably, they are quite wrong. It is still not clear exactly what did cause the blackouts, which were rectified pretty quickly, but it seems to have been a grid problem, not a renewables supply problem. Some 2MW of renewable power was disconnected, but as a RESULT of the grid disturbance, not as a cause. In a statement, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez specifically ruled out renewable or nuclear energy as a cause of the outage, calling such claims "lies" and "ignorance".
Both Spain and Portugal do have a high proportion of renewable energy in their grids, but they have developed over the years good systems for handling intermittent sources of energy, and have a robust system of energy storage in place. I wish we had something comparable.
The actual causes of the blackout are still being studied, whatever the Daily Telegraph may have already decided.
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