Despite calling the blackout a “wake-up call,” the Reuters piece completely downplays the direct, clear as day role that renewables played in the outage.
While the piece opens by asserting that “reliance on renewables is not to blame,” it goes on to outline exactly how renewables are to blame, with a timeline of events that directly tie the blackout to a massive, unexplained drop in solar power production.
“At around 12:30 p.m., electricity generation in Spain dropped rapidly from around 27 gigawatts to just over 12 GW,” Reuters reported, adding that the loss “was equivalent to 10% of Spain’s total installed capacity.” The article admits that “a collapse in Spain’s solar power system was certainly involved.”
Data from Spain’s grid operator Red Electrica shows that solar output plummeted from about 18 GW to just under 5 GW in a little over an hour. That drop accounted for the majority of the total generation loss that destabilized the entire grid. The article itself concedes this was the trigger for the widespread failure, yet insists renewables are not at fault, a contradiction that Reuters doesn't ever explain and instead ignores.
Once the solar collapse occurred, the system’s lack of “grid inertia” exacerbated the crisis. Traditional energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels generate kinetic energy through rotating turbines, which helps stabilize the grid during sudden losses of power. In contrast, solar and wind—which made up nearly 70% of Spain’s power mix at the time—do not produce inertia, making it impossible to maintain the required 50 Hz frequency needed for system stability.
The blackout did not stop at Spain’s borders. Since Spain supplies electricity to Portugal, the disruption spread across the Iberian Peninsula. Even parts of France experienced temporary outages.
Reuters also notes that avoiding similar outages in the short term would require “a higher baseload of rotating power generation.” Longer term, the solution involves major investment in battery storage and advanced grid management technologies to stabilize frequency and store surplus energy. However, as the article points out, global investment in grids still lags behind spending on solar, creating “bottlenecks for the energy transition,” according to the International Energy Agency.
Despite calling the blackout a “wake-up call,” the Reuters piece completely downplays the direct, clear as day role that renewables played in the outage. Though they can explain how and why renewables failed, they never once in the article point to it as a problem.
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