Commentary
Three weeks ago, all of Spain was startled by a complete electricity blackout without warning. Air traffic control could not contact airplanes, trains stalled in stations or stopped on their tracks mid-journey, telecommunications were knocked out, and a national emergency was declared. These blackouts spread into southern France and Portugal, conveying the regrettable and apparently unsuspected message that if one nation mismanages its grid, it takes its neighbours down with it.
It appears almost certain that the cause of these blackouts was Spain’s hyperactive green energy policies, and the disruption that occurred, unless preventive avoidance measures are taken, was a sobering glimpse into the future for the more environmentally militant countries. Portugal’s grid operator initially blamed the blackouts on “anomalous oscillations” in long-distance high-voltage lines. This supposedly caused an “induced atmospheric variation,” which in turn generated failures of synchronization and power disturbances across the entire European system. Of course, this explanation is incomprehensible even to specialists and appears to be a jumble of technical terms crafted to muddy the political waters about what really happened and who is to blame for it.
All complicated power systems require a steady flow from the source of supply to the place of demand. According to the initial Portuguese explanation (which Portugal’s grid operator has since said was falsely attributed to it), the flow of power was disrupted at some point, which caused an automatic demand for increased backup power from wind and solar sources. This in turn aggravated the desired state of inertia and the entire system failed.
Subsequent reporting indicates that Spain had a small amount of what is known as dispatchable power generation, which means the sources that can be tapped to meet increased demand, such as nuclear power and natural gas. These sources are used to maintain a steady frequency but they do not include wind and solar power, which are known as intermittent power. This is an area where Spain overachieved and produced an unusually high potential contribution from those sources, as much as 80 percent. As Spain is a proverbially sunny country, photovoltaic solar power is comparatively reliable, so when the so-called “atmospheric oscillations” occurred, if they did, the Spanish grid was vulnerable because of its relatively small resources of dispatchable power.
Dispatchable resources are produced by turbines which, when there is some form of overload or apparent oscillation, shut down gradually, unlike renewable power which shuts off abruptly. At the time of writing, the consensus appears to be that the renewable shutdown caused the hemorrhaging blackouts on April 28. Over a week before, on April 16, wind, solar, and hydroelectric together made up 100 percent of the power generated in Spain, causing great publicity and self-congratulation.
Spain, like Germany under the former government of Angela Merkel, has been browbeaten or cajoled by radical environmentalists into building up wind and solar sources of power to enable the shuttering of the much more efficient and reliable nuclear plants, which Germany did in 2023. This reduced Germany to a state of energy vassalage to Russian gas supplied by pipeline. After the outbreak of the Ukraine war, Germany conscientiously transferred a good deal of this away from Russia to American liquefied natural gas and lignite coal. Many readers will recall that it was at this point that former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unbelievably informed the German chancellor that there has “never been a strong business case” for exporting Canadian LNG to Europe.
In the case of Spain, because of its heavy dependence on wind and solar power, a durable solution to the sort of problem that shut down the country is made more complicated by its deliberate policy decision not to have a substantial replacement capacity of dispatchable power. While the reason for the blackout in Spain has not been absolutely confirmed, the fact that it occurred at all and affected neighbouring countries has severely shaken the customary gamecock self-confidence of the militant greens.
Most advanced Western countries have noted the strength of a bias in favour of the cleanest air and water possible, which is commendable and was overdue in asserting itself. This was a point famously made by John Kenneth Galbraith in his influential book “The Affluent Society” in the mid-1950s. He described a family picnic beside a polluted river and speculated that they could “contemplate the curious unevenness of their blessings.”
The economic realities of the cost of sharply reducing fossil fuel use to the average individual and family have generally collided with and overwhelmed the natural preference all people have for the cleanest possible environment. When these economic considerations are torqued up by acute crises of reliability in the energy supply, the environmental activists are going to be routed. To have recourse again to the jargon of contemporary electric power questions, Spain’s electricity supply has “no graceful failure mode.”
The lesson in all this for Canada is a cautionary one. We have among the greatest hydroelectric resources of any country in the world, and Hydro-Québec remains a world leader in its field. Ontario Hydro preceded public power in Quebec and was a world-admired and pioneering organization, carefully studied by then-New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt and emulated in many aspects in the tremendous project known as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), with which he brought electricity as well as flood and drought control and a canal system to millions of people. The TVA also served as a source for the original creation of atomic energy.
The success of Ontario Hydro is what enabled Sir Henry Pellatt to build Casa Loma in Toronto, but that great enterprise was seriously mismanaged at times, in particular by the McGuinty government, and has been disassembled.
The message Canada should take on board is the danger of over-reliance on so-called sustainable and renewable energy. Such energy is also extremely expensive and perilously unreliable. Access to adequate electric power for everyone is a criterion of modern life that vastly transcends the fads and fashions of environmental zealots. One dares to hope that our new prime minister, who long toiled in the vineyards of environmental zealotry, has taken note of these events.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
