Spanish blackout should serve as a warning

If policymakers don’t want Americans to find themselves in the dark, then they should pay attention to the harmful electricity policies in Spain. 

Spain experienced a nearly unprecedented blackout on April 29. The entire Iberian Peninsula was impacted by the blackout, Both Spain and Portugal were without power for more than 12 hours, and more than 55 million people were left in the dark. The investment bank RBC estimated the economic costs of the blackout  to be  between 2.25 and 4.5 billion euros.

Incidents like this one often have unclear causes at the beginning. At this point, it’s clear that the level of renewables being utilized on the Spanish grid was the main issue.  

Spain has a particularly high penetration of wind and solar on its grid. Fifty-six percent of the country’s electricity came from these sources in 2024, with a target of 81 percent by 2030. Just 12 days before the blackout, Spain announced that for the first time renewables were meeting 100 percent of demand (albeit on a weekday and only for a short while). At the time of the blackout, 70 percent of Spain’s total power came from wind and solar.

The problem is that these sources are intermittent and only available when the sun is shining, or the wind is blowing. The rest of the grid is able to absorb this intermittency when there is a significant mass of thermal power plants like nuclear, gas, and coal. These plants can be relied upon to produce electricity consistently because they are dispatchable (can be called upon as needed). They have reliable output and are able to maintain inertia from the spinning motion of their turbines which provides a bit of insulation to sudden outages.

When there’s less of this inertia on the grid it’s harder to absorb plants suddenly dropping off. Wind and solar unpredictably go offline because of the weather. A combination of less thermal units and more wind and solar with little to no stored power to back it up is a recipe for disaster.

Following the blackouts, a Reuters report entreated readers not to blame renewables for the blackout, stating that “reliance on renewables is not to blame. Rather, the issue appears to be the management of renewables in the modern grid.”

This characterization fails to realize that the management of renewables is a problem of renewables themselves. They are fundamentally different than other sources of electricity and require different systems to function optimally. But the very expensive systems already in place would require equally expensive alternatives to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future.

There is concern in Europe that other countries may face similar incidents, and that expensive upgrades to the power grid will be needed to avert potential blackouts.

The US should also take this blackout as a warning. Some states have far higher renewables penetrations than others. Texas and California both have significant wind and solar penetrations, and other areas like Florida, Iowa, and the Great Plains region aren’t far behind.

State renewable portfolio standards, which require that a certain percentage of power in the state be generated by renewables are also contributing to this problem. Many states including Texas and California have these policies in place.

Federal policy has also contributed to this vulnerability. The Investment and Production Tax Credits which give companies tax credits to build new facilities and for the power that they produce has encouraged more wind and solar to be built than the power market would have otherwise demanded. These credits which were extended under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), should be repealed.

Wind and solar power come with tradeoffs just as every form of power generation does. But the problems with these sources have been ignored for too long. Congress should act to remove the IRA subsidies that have encouraged too many of these facilities to be built. State governments should also revisit their own electricity policies to ensure that undue preferential treatment is not given to wind and solar development.

The power grid should serve the needs of its customers, not the political aims of federal and state governments. Consumers want power that’s affordable and reliable. Policies that risk reliability for the sake of other aims should be rejected.