U.S. Energy Secretary Tries to Blame Renewables for Spain's Power Outage

Scientific American

30-04-2025

CLIMATEWIRE | Spain and Portugal were still in the dark Monday when U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright went on television to blame a widespread power outage on renewable energy.
'It's very sad to see what's happened to Portugal and Spain and so many people there. But you know, when you hitch your wagon to the weather, it's just a risky endeavor,' Wright told CNBC.
The remark represented a thinly veiled swipe at wind and solar, which were powering almost three-quarters of the Spanish grid at the time it went dark. The comments stood in contrast to those made by the CEO of the Spanish grid operator, who said no 'definitive conclusions' for the outage had been reached.
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But they fit a broader pattern for Wright, a former oil field services executive who has sought to paint wind and solar as costly, unreliable energy sources that threaten the reliability of the electric grid.
Renewables could have played a role in an outage that left tens of millions without power, grid experts said. But they cautioned against rushing to conclusions, saying that a series of systematic factors likely were needed for the power systems of two countries to go black inside five seconds Monday.
'What I would say is this has the hallmarks of being a very complicated event,' said Eamonn Lannoye, managing director for Europe at the Electric Power Research Institute, which works with the utility industry. 'It's not going to be cut and dry.'
Grid disasters have become political fodder in recent years, fueling debates over the role of intermittent resources such as wind and solar.
In 2021, when a winter storm slammed into Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) was quick to blame wind and solar for rolling blackouts that left 4.5 million without power. An investigation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission later concluded the state's power system was insufficiently winterized to survive such a storm. It pinned much of the blame on the state's natural gas system, which reported widespread freezes during the event.
'I've seen this playbook: Day one, blame renewables. Then the facts come out six months later,' said Michael Webber, a professor who studies the power industry at the University of Texas at Austin. 'There's always more to the story.'
Wright has often taken aim at renewables during his time in office.
In his welcome remarks to Energy Department staffers, he attributed rising power costs in Europe to solar and wind. A month later, at an industry conference in Houston, he said that wherever wind and solar generation increased, power prices have followed.
Wright on Monday went on CNBC from Poland, where he had gone to announce a deal to help the country build its first nuclear power plant. He was asked by CNBC anchor Brian Sullivan if the blackout in Spain and Portugal had led to the realization "we're going to need a lot of power from all different types of sources?"
Wright did not explicitly mention wind and solar in his response, but he claimed Europe's percentage of global gross domestic product was falling due to 'expensive, unreliable energy."
'It's a choice, but it's a bad choice,' he said.
Andrea Woods, a DOE spokesperson, said Wright was responding to a question about the need to diversify energy supplies. 'He was not making an assessment on the cause of the blackout,' she said.
Experts say there are challenges with running a power grid with growing amounts of renewable resources. Grid operators need to keep supply and demand in constant balance to maintain the system's electric frequency and inertia. That's easier to do with traditional resources such as coal, gas and nuclear, which rely on large spinning turbines, said Pratheeksha Ramdas, an analyst at Rystad Energy.
Wind and solar facilities can be equipped with rotating turbines that provide those services, but few currently are, she said. Batteries can be used to stabilize frequency, but their deployment in Spain and Portugal is limited.
'It is still early to draw definitive lessons, as the full investigation is ongoing. However, the event does highlight some broad challenges — particularly the need for fast and flexible support systems to prevent cascading failures,' Ramdas wrote in an email.
The outages in Spain and Portugal began shortly after 12:30 p.m. on Monday, when a widespread generation outage occurred in southwestern Spain, said Eduardo Prieto, CEO of Red Eléctrica, the Spanish grid operator.
The system responded to the outage, but was hit with another generation outage 1.5 seconds later, he said. That prompted a disruption in power flows between Spain and France and widespread disconnection of renewable resources across the grid. Within five seconds, the voltage of the entire system went to zero.
Asked at a press conference Tuesday if renewables had contributed to the outage, Prieto said it was 'premature to make any pronouncements' but noted the grid operator is investigating a widespread generation outage in the southwest.
'Given the southwest region I mentioned, it's quite possible the affected generation could be solar, but as I said, without the information, we cannot conclude anything definitively,' he said.
Webber, the Texas professor, said he was struggling to understand how a sudden loss of power generation, particularly from a solar facility, could trigger such a widespread outage. Electric grids are designed to withstand sudden losses of generation from large power plants. Traditionally, those standards are designed to withstand a large nuclear power plant tripping offline, which would lead to a large disruption in the frequency and inertia of the electric grid.
That 'one solar farm going offline should have caused so much trouble, that seems suspicious to me,' said Webber, who previously worked for a large French utility. 'Something happened there that I can't fully explain.'
EPRI's Lannoye echoed that assessment. The more likely explanation is that the control systems, which connect power plants to the grid, likely failed at a series of facilities. That was the case in 2019, when a lightning strike hit an offshore wind farm and natural gas plant in the United Kingdom. The control systems on those power plants malfunctioned, precipitating a series of events that led to a power outage affecting 1 million people.
But there is not enough information to determine why those systems might have failed in the case of Spain and Portugal, or if such controls were even at fault, he said.
'It's too early to cast judgment, and it's certainly not going to seal the fate of one technology or another,' Lannoye said. 'If a blackout had sealed the fate of a technology before now, we wouldn't have gas, we wouldn't have coal, we wouldn't have nuclear. We'd be left with no options.'