URGENT: Yet more legacy media deception on a vital issue

Overdependence on solar and other renewable energy is almost surely the reason almost 60 million people in Spain and Portugal lost power yesterday. Don't try to find that fact in the NY Times, though.

I can’t believe I have to call out my old editors at the New York Times for running blatantly dishonest journalism for the second day in a row.¹

But I do, so here goes.

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(Before I do, though… stand with me against the lies of the legacy media.)

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Yesterday, just past noon local time, the electric systems in Spain and Portugal failed without warning.

Power remained out across both countries for much of the day and wasn’t fully restored until today. The disruption was profound. Subway riders evacuated stalled trains in darkened tunnels. Cellular service (which, unlike landlines, does not have backup batteries) went down. Elevators were stuck. ATMs and traffic lights went out.

Not across a city, or a state, but two nations that together have almost 60 million people. (Small parts of southern France were also affected.)

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The outage attracted worldwide attention — and legacy media headscratching.

The usual explanations for blackouts were nowhere in sight. No earthquakes hit, no hurricanes or forest fires were raging. Even climate change, the usual media bugaboo for all disasters natural and manmade, couldn’t be blamed. It’s April, not July, and the weather was mild across the Iberian peninsula, in the 70s from Lisbon to Barcelona, 700 miles northeast. Nor was demand for power particularly high yesterday.

Just after the outage, Portugal’s electric network operator supposedly blamed “extreme temperature variations” in Spain for “induced atmospheric vibration.” Those led to “oscillations” on high voltage lines, according to several newspapers, including England’s Guardian.

“Millions without power in Spain, Portugal after 'induced atmospheric vibration',” a USA Today headline incoherently but confidently explained.

Of course. Induced atmospheric vibration. If that sounds like gobbledygook, it’s because it is. By Tuesday morning, the Guardian had disappeared those words, claiming the Portuguese company “said the statement was falsely attributed to it.”

Oh. Other unlikely explanations included cyber attacks and solar flares, eruptions of radiation from the sun that can disrupt powerlines. But solar flares are hard to miss, and none were a problem on Monday.

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(I see the light)

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But even as the legacy media offered bizarre theories, power industry analysts and energy experts on X proposed a far simpler, more plausible explanation: Spain’s near-total reliance on green energy had left it very vulnerable to cascading blackouts.

For all its magic, electricity is actually relatively easy to understand at the theoretical level; it is the flow of electrons — negatively charged particles — that carry energy. Scientists began to understand this fact in the 1700s. A century later they had realized that swinging magnets along coils of wire would produce usable current. The energy to swing the magnets comes from steam heated in coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear plants, or directly from the flow of water in hydropower dams. (I remember the basics from AP Physics, and Google confirms them.)

After the electricity is produced, grids of wires carry it to homes and businesses, where it makes lights, computers, and motors run.² Here, the engineering gets complicated. Electric plants produce “alternating” current, because of the way the magnets spin, and most household devices run on it.³ Demand for electricity fluctuates by the second, and supply must exactly match demand to keep the grid functioning properly. Traditional power plants have several different ways to manage this task. Their success in doing so is a key reason that modern, wealthy countries almost never have widespread blackouts.

But solar plants produce direct current, which must be “inverted” into alternating current before it is added to the grid. Wind turbines have their own hurdles adding power. As a result, wind and solar plants cannot manage unexpected changes in frequency nearly as well as older sources.

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This risk is not a secret to power companies — or renewable energy suppliers. In 2022, the consortium of companies that runs Europe’s electricity network released a 63-page report on the issue.

It is highly technical and obscure (perhaps deliberately so), but it notes that older plants “have traditionally provided various ‘inherent’ capabilities to the system critical to ensure the stable operation of the power systems…” and that wind and solar power have a “lack of these system capabilities.”

But in the rush last decade to pacify climate change activists and decarbonize the world (except, of course, for India and China), niceties like the realities of physics seem to have been overlooked. European countries have moved quickly away from boring, reliable sources of power generation and towards solar and wind.

No country has moved faster than Spain, which has sol to spare. In mid-April, Spain ran its electricity grid fully on renewable energy on a weekday for the first time.

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(Mess with the bull…)

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Oh well. Renewable energy was fun while it lasted. Heck, I’ve got panels on my roof (the tax credit didn’t hurt).

But well-defined theoretical risks that are ignored for political reasons have a strange way of coming true. The strong consensus on X is that the lack of simple, reliable, fossil fuel or nuclear-powered baseload generation with high “inertia,” as the engineers say, is a big reason that Spain’s grid failed so fast and took nearly a day to reboot fully.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media keeps scratching its head and staring into the sun for solar flares. “The cause of the outage remained unclear,” the Times’s current headline explains helpfully.

If this were 2021, the Biden Administration would no doubt call blaming renewables “misinformation” and Twitter and Facebook would be censoring articles like this oneas Russian propaganda or whatever. At least now the skeptics can call the media out without fear of being banned.

Progress, I suppose.

Though it doesn’t fix the underlying problem. After two decades of putting up solar and wind farms at massive taxpayer expense, Europe has turned electricity from cheap and reliable to the reverse. If the sun shines too brightly, the lights go out.

Congrats, Greta Thunberg!

1. I know, you can. As cynical as I’ve become, I guess I’m still not cynical enough.

2. Along the way the voltage - a measure of the “pressure” causing the electrons to move — is raised in order to reduce the energy wasted as the current flows, then lowered so it is safer for household use.

3. In Europe, alternating current is produced at 50 hertz, or cycles per second. In the United States, it’s produced at 60.