Renewables don't risk blackouts, said the media. But they did and they do. The physics are simple. And now, as blackouts in Spain strand people in elevators, jam traffic, and ground flights, it's clear that too little "inertia" due to excess solar resulted in system collapse.
Six days ago, the media celebrated a significant milestone: Spain’s national grid operated entirely on renewable energy for the first time during a weekday.
At 12:35 pm today local time, the lights went out across Spain and Portugal, and parts of France. Although power was quickly restored in France, it could take a week to fully restore power in Spain and Portugal.
In an instant, the electric hum of modern life — trains, hospitals, airports, phones, traffic lights, cash registers — fell silent. Tens of millions of people instantly plunged into chaos, confusion, and darkness. People got stuck in elevators. Subways stopped between stations. Gas stations couldn’t pump fuel. Grocery stores couldn’t process payments. Air traffic controllers scrambled as systems failed and planes were diverted. In hospitals, backup generators sputtered on, but in many cases could not meet full demand.
It was one of the largest peacetime blackouts Europe has ever seen. And it was not random. It was not an unforeseeable event. It was the exact failure that many of ushave been, repeatedly, warning lawmakers about for years — warnings that Europe’s political leaders systematically chose to ignore.
While Portugal’s grid operator REN initially blamed the mass blackout on “extreme temperature variations” and a “rare atmospheric phenomenon,” and while some media repeated that framing, the reality is more serious. Weather may have triggered the event, but it was not the cause of the system’s collapse.
Spain’s national grid operator, Red Eléctrica, revealed that the immediate cause of the blackout was a “very strong oscillation in the electrical network” that forced Spain’s grid to disconnect from the broader European system, leading to the collapse of the Iberian Peninsula’s power supply at 12:38 p.m.
“No one has ever attempted a black start on a grid that relies so heavily on renewables as Iberia,” noted @JKempEnergy . “The limited number of thermal generators will make it more challenging to re-establish momentum and frequency control.”
In a traditional power grid dominated by heavy spinning machines — coal plants, gas turbines, nuclear reactors — small disturbances, even from severe weather, are absorbed and smoothed out by the sheer physical inertia of the system. The heavy rotating mass of the generators acts like a shock absorber, resisting rapid changes in frequency and stabilizing the grid.
But in an electricity system dominated by solar panels, wind turbines, and inverters, there is almost no physical inertia. Solar panels produce no mechanical rotation. Most modern wind turbines are electronically decoupled from the grid and provide little stabilizing force. Inverter-based systems, which dominate modern renewable energy grids, are precise but delicate. They follow the frequency of the grid rather than resisting sudden changes....
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And if you are a politician blaming the weather for blackouts, fires, or floods, the voters should fire you. Seriously! You're only advertising your own incompetence!
Politicians have been blaming the weather and climate change for blackouts for years! This is from 2021
Journalists, experts, and elected officials in July 2021 blamed heat wave deaths, forest fires, and electricity shortages in New York, California, and Texas on climate change, but the underlying cause of those events was lack of air conditioning, lack of electricity, and the failure to properly manage forests, not marginal changes to temperatures.
It’s true that there have been more heat waves in the United States since 1960, and that higher temperatures dry out the dead wood in forests, contributing to a greater area burned by forest fires. “Climate dries the [wood] fuels out and extends the fire season from 4-6 months to nearly year-round,” US Forest Service scientist Malcolm North explained to me last summer.
But what determines whether people die in heat waves is whether or not they have air conditioning, not whether temperatures rose to 111° instead of 109°. Proof of that comes from the fact that heat-related deaths declined in the US by 50% to 75% since 1960 thanks entirely to air conditioning, even as heat waves grew in frequency, intensity, and length.
What determines whether a fire in a forest is high-intensity or low-intensity is the amount of wood fuel. Climate change is “not the cause of the intensity of the [mountain forest] fires,” stressed North. “The cause of that is fire suppression and the existing debt of wood fuel.”
And what determines whether or not there is enough electricity is whether there are sufficient “baseload,” reliable power plants and fuels, not marginally higher use of air conditioners. The people who manage electricity grids knew perfectly well that it could be hot last summer, hot this summer, and that a cold snap like the one that occurred in Texas in February was likely, since worse cold snaps had occurred in the past.
The main reason there aren’t enough reliable power plants is because progressive activists, scientists, and journalists successfully persuaded policymakers to shut them down, not build them, or not operate them.
And the reason California has failed to properly manage its forests is because, for decades, its leaders underinvested in fire prevention, including by diverting money that the state’s electric utilities could and should have spent on clearing the area around electrical lines, to renewables...
At first they said it was only polite to refer to someone by their preferred pronounds. Then, they demanded social media censorship. Now, governments are fining, and may soon jail, people who deny the lie that men can become women. This is as terrifying as anything in "1984."
European and Latin American leaders are at this moment working together to create a global Censorship Industrial Complex that will require every person online to deny biological reality and embrace pseudoscience.
Brazil's highest court could soon decide whether to imprison a women's rights activist for up to 25 years for a single sentence spoken in an Instagram video and the sharing of four X posts written by others, even though neither her words nor those of others violated any existing Brazilian law.
Under Article 213 of Brazil’s Penal Code, the base sentence for rape is 6 to 10 years for standard cases and 8 to 12 years if the rape involves violence or serious threat and causes serious bodily harm. As such, Cêpa could receive a prison term twice as long as what men receive for rape.
The Supreme Court decided to reopen a case against Isabela Cêpa, which may determine whether the court can criminalize speech by judicial decree, bypassing the democratic process entirely. In fact, a federal judge had already dismissed the case, agreeing with prosecutors that Cêpa’s statements did not meet the legal threshold for hate speech and that no law had been violated.
"The Supreme Court took the case and now they have only two options," Cêpa told me in our interview. "One of them is to admit that they're applying a law that does not exist and [that] they're punishing people for crimes that do not exist. And the other option would be to send me to jail. I'm pretty sure what their decision will be."
The 32-year-old feminist activist's journey to exile began at an airport in Brazil in July 2024. Eight federal police officers surrounded her, she says, poring over her case file with puzzled expressions.
"Do you know about any charges or anything against you?" she recalls them asking.
"This makes no sense," she says one police officer commented after reading the charges. According to her account, they held the plane at the gate while deciding her fate. "This is a case of political persecution. You're not safe," she says an officer told her before escorting her onto a flight to Madrid.
Brazilian authorities had flagged her name at every airport in the country, she says. Since that day, she says she has lived in forced exile, moving between locations, unable to return home....
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Whether @AGPamBondi , @FBIDirectorKash , and/or @FBIDDBongino stay or go, one thing is clear: the Trump admin. must release the Epstein Files. It's our God-given right to know. The issue has transcended partisanship, and neither the Right nor Left are moving on.
Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz just now: " I know for a fact [Epstein] documents are being suppressed and they're being suppressed to protect individuals. I know the names of the individuals, I know why they're being suppressed. I know who's suppressing them, but I'm bound by confidentiality from a judge and cases, and I can't disclose what I know. But, hand to God, I know the names of people whose files are being suppressed in order to protect them, and that's wrong."
@SeanSpicer : “Just out of curiosity, without names, are these politicians, business leaders…”
Dershowtiz: “Both. Everything.”
The lip synching is messed up but it's real and not AI. Here's the original:
Correction: The video is from 3 months ago. @seanspicer posted it just now.
Within minutes of Texas floods killing dozens of girls, the media said it was because of Trump budget cuts and climate change. In truth, the deaths occurred in “one of the highest flood-prone regions in the entire state,” warnings were issued, and the underlying cause was the failure to install flood warning sirens. Climate journalists are cultists.
Trump cuts to the National Weather Service, and climate change, are to blame for the Texas flood deaths, said the media yesterday. Today, most admit NWS did its job. The real problem was the lack of a flood warning system. Those who blame the climate are trapped in a weird cult.
Per capita flooding deaths in Texas declined dramatically:
"As the population of Texas increased from ~9.2 million in 1958 to ~28.6 million in 2018, overall flood deaths remained fairly constant, meaning that the fatality rate dropped by about two-thirds." @RogerPielkeJr
More Pielke: "The flooding was certainly extreme but it should not have been historically unexpected. The documented record of extreme flooding in “flash flood alley” goes back several centuries, with paleoclimatology records extending that record thousands of years into the past.
"Consider the figure above, from a classic 1940 historical text on U.S. floods, which shows that the same region of Texas that experienced this week’s floods has long been known to be a bullseye for flash flooding. In fact, almost a century before Hoyt and Langbein, Texas experienced one of the greatest losses of life in U.S. history related to extreme weather.
"In 1846, in the months after Texas became a U.S. state, massive flooding compounded the many problems facing thousands of recent immigrants from Germany who had been settled in New Braunfels, Texas, which was significantly impacted by this week’s floods.
"According to a contemporaneous 1846 account, cited in a fantastic 2006 PhD dissertation on flooding in Texas by William Keith Guthrie, at the University of Kansas, 'The Guadalupe [River] would often rise fifteen feet above its normal stand after these heavy rains, carrying with it in its swift torrent a number of large trees, uprooted farther up the hills. Smaller brooks, ordinarily not containing flowing water, became raging torrents which could be crossed only by swimming.'"
The website of NYC mayoral frontrunner says he'll "shift the tax burden" to "whiter neighborhoods." When asked about his openly racist agenda, @ZohranKMamdani insists it's not a proposal at all but rather "a description of what we see right now." That's next-level gaslighting.😬
This guy's ability to lie so calmly while smiling should send chills up the spines of every New Yorker.
He could have taken it down and said, "You know, I regret that the website said that and so I deleted it, because it doesn't express what I believe."
Instead, he's just asked millions of New Yorkers to believe his own obviously flagrant lie rather than their own eyes. That's creepy and wrong.
Everyone can see for themselves that he used a gratuitous racial reference regarding a tax proposal. We don't tax people on race. So why use it? Because he and his campaign wanted to introduce race.
And it's not the first time. @ZohranKMamdani should delete his flagrantly racist tweets and web site language, apologize, and promise to never invoke racism in these ways again.
The audacity of @ZohranKMamdani to cite Dr. Martin Luther King should make your skin crawl. King adamantly rejected anti-white racism.
Mamdani’s call for higher taxes on white neighborhoods should shock New Yorkers. If they elect him as Mayor then they will have no excuses. He’s made clear that he will advance a racist agenda and then demand that people believe his lies.