Spain reaches net zero: Zero emissions … and zero electricity

: World Tribune; 29 April 2025; Hits: 2

Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, April 29, 2025 Real World News

As Western liberals say, net zero refers to the balance between the amount of greenhouse gas that’s produced and the amount that’s removed from the atmosphere. It can be achieved, they insist, through a combination of emission reduction and emission removal.

Spain, and Portugal, achieved a kind of net zero on Monday:

Zero electricity.

Just six days after Spain boasted that its national grid operated entirely on renewable energy for the first time during a weekday, at 12:35 p.m. local time on Monday the lights went out across Spain and Portugal, and parts of France.

In a Substack.com analysis Michael Shellenberger noted: “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. Cell towers collapsed under surges and outages.”

Early indications suggest the culprit could likely be net zero.

Despite being warned, Europe’s liberals have been focused on retiring fossil fuel power and nuclear generation plants, swapping them for unreliable solar and wind.

Shellenberger noted that the political and regulatory energy in Europe “remained focused on accelerating renewable deployment, not upgrading the grid’s basic stability. In Spain, solar generation continued to climb rapidly through 2023 and early 2024.

“Coal plants closed. Nuclear units retired. On many spring days by 2025, Spain’s midday solar generation exceeded its total afternoon demand, leading to frequent negative electricity prices. The system was being pushed to the limit. And today, at 12:35 pm, it broke.

“Spain’s blackout wasn’t just a technical failure. It was a political and strategic failure. Unless Spain rapidly invests in synthetic inertia, maintains and expands its nuclear fleet, or adds some other new form of heavy rotating generation, the risk of future blackouts will only grow worse.”

At 12:30 p.m. local time on Monday, solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, and wind power together supplied about 78 percent of all electricity generation in Spain. Nuclear provided about 11.5 percent. Co-generation, mostly industrial waste heat plants, added another 5 percent. Gas-fired plants contributed about 3 percent — less than one gigawatt across the entire grid.

“This meant that almost no dispatchable, spinning generation was online. No heavy turbines. No stabilizing momentum. Almost no inertia, the physical property that resists sudden changes in motion, and which has stabilized electrical grids for over 100 years,” Shellenberger wrote.

When the disturbance hit at around 12:35 p.m., “the system had nothing to resist it. The grid’s frequency, essentially the heartbeat of the system, instantly plunged. The disturbance didn’t just affect Spain. Grid frequency drops were registered across continental Europe,” Shellenberger added. “People will rightly note that things could have been done to prevent this, but the underlying point remains: large quantities of renewables make the grid unstable, potentially catastrophically so.”

Zero Hedge noted: “Great job, Western liberals, on the deranged march to net-zero, culminating in the implosion of part of Europe’s power grid. Meanwhile, China is adding record amounts of coal and nuclear power capacity. It’s almost as if the entire green movement is about de-growth — and, in some cases, seems like sabotage fueled by sheer stupidity.”

The Iberian Peninsula… wiped off the map of lights. This is how it looked from orbit last night after a massive blackout hit Spain and Portugal. Cosmic silence over the region.”#Blackout #IberianPeninsula #Spain #Portugal #PowerOutage #SatelliteView #EarthAtNight… pic.twitter.com/0HyA7tN8m0

— David Sobolewski (@buzzyrobot) April 29, 2025