Spain’s blackouts are a disaster made by Net Zero

‘We face a long night’, warned Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez yesterday evening, after much of Spain, Portugal and south-west France were plunged into darkness by the worst power outage in European history. Tens of millions of people were left without electricity. Trains were halted, planes were grounded and the internet was shut down. Modern life ground to a halt across the Iberian Peninsula. Although the exact causes of the blackout have yet to be declared, we can be certain of one thing: the risk of such outages will only get worse as we embark on the path towards Net Zero.

Spain and Portugal are increasingly reliant on solar and wind power. Renewables were supplying 80 per cent of electricity just before the outages. The blackouts were triggered by a rapid loss of power – of around 15GW, the equivalent of 60 per cent of Spain’s national electricity demand. It is not clear what exactly led to this loss, although a cyber attack has been ruled out. What matters is that a renewable-heavy grid is far less able to absorb this kind of shock than one that runs on traditional energy sources.

Coal and gas plants, or hydroelectric dams, have what is called ‘inertia’ built into the system, whereas wind and solar do not. The spinning turbines used in traditional energy generation will not immediately grind to a halt when there is a fault, acting as a buffer against power outages. ‘In a low-inertia environment’, explains energy expert Kathryn Porter, ‘if you have had a significant grid fault in one area, or a cyber attack, or whatever it may be, the grid operators therefore have less time to react. That can lead to cascading failures if you cannot get it under control quickly.’

It is not as if Europe’s leaders are unaware of these risks. The International Energy Agency (IEA), which vociferously promotes Net Zero in public, circulated a confidential paper to world leaders last week, ahead of the UK government’s summit on the future of energy security. According to Bloomberg, the IEA warned that ‘systemic challenges will emerge from balancing increasingly renewable-dominated grids’. For energy systems to work, supply needs to be matched precisely to demand, or ‘balanced’, which is made infinitely more difficult with renewables, which are so variable and unpredictable – a fact green ideologues are usually reluctant to acknowledge.

And the risk of blackouts is far from the only downside of renewable energy. Sources like wind and solar rely entirely on the vagaries of the weather. If wind speeds are too low, or the Sun fails to shine, the grid will need to source electricity from elsewhere. Usually, this is from gas or coal plants, which then have to be fired up at short notice, often at exorbitant cost, to make up for the shortfall.

Too much wind or sunshine can also cause problems. Surges from wind turbines or solar farms can make the electricity grid unstable. To avoid this, energy companies are often paid to take their renewables offline. These so-called constraint payments cost the UK £252million in the first two months of 2025. Wind farms were paid around £180,000 per hour to do nothing.

The result of the drive to Net Zero is energy that is both more expensive and considerably less reliable – so unreliable, in fact, that blackouts on the scale of those in Spain and Portugal could soon cease to be rare. So why do our leaders still tell us that going green is the answer? That cheap, abundant ‘clean’ energy is around the corner, lowering bills and powering new industries?

Our elites’ embrace of green ideology has divorced them from reality. The blackouts in Spain and Portugal are a taste of the bleak future to come, should we fail to change course.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.