Gone With the Wind

Blackouts in Spain and Portugal and the race to Net Zero Energy

(Energy summit in Net Zerolandia. Source: Substack Image Generator)

“How true is the saying that man was forced to invent work in order to escape the strain of having to think.”

~ Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile (1937)

Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World: Alexandria, Egypt...

Thinking must be a real drag, judging by the lengths most people go to avoid it.

Don’t believe us? Just open the papers!

Right there, carefully laid out beneath the mastheads of the most hallowed institutions in print journalism, lies a daily record of man’s stupidest ideas, bone-headed follies and unwavering commitment to outright idiocy.

Casting around for an example, we find ourselves spoiled for choice.

AOC fundraising soars as the New York rep and Bernie Sanders barnstorm U.S. against Trump ~ MSNBC

Canadian election: Mark Carney’s Liberal party wins fourth term ~ The Guardian

Women's Pool Final Played by Two Transgender Athletes ~ Newsweek

More collectivist nonsense... more central planning... more ignoring reality and expecting to escape the inevitable consequences...

What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, no matter how nonsensical things get over in the Americas, there’s always a smug congress of know-it-all eurocrats, tilting at renewable windmills on this side of the Atlantic, ready to lead the way... backwards.

“¡Sostén mi cerveza y mira esto!”

Brainpower Outage

This time, it’s the Spaniards turn. Here’s Madrid’s “paper of record,” El Pais, from a couple of years ago, gushing over their country’s “renewable energy banquet,” as though their net zero obsessed governmental overlords were multiplying loaves of bread and fish for the tapas-starved masses...

The nine hours in which Spain made the 100% renewable dream a reality

Electricity generation through solar, wind and water exceeded total demand in mainland Spain on Tuesday, a pattern that will be repeated more and more in the future.

The Spanish power grid on Tuesday tasted an appetizer of the renewable energy banquet that is expected to flourish in the coming years. For nine hours, between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m., the generation of green electricity was more than enough to cover 100% of Spanish peninsular demand, a milestone that had already been reached on previous occasions, but not for such a prolonged period.

Yes dear reader, you read that right. After redirecting billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies towards so-called “green energy”... after countless Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) confabs and gabfests around the world... after decommissioning nuclear plants and demonizing the fossil fuel industry... Spain was able to power its entire economy for... 0.103% of the year, all in a row!

Hmmm... if only the world knew of a cheap, abundant, reliable energy source that could meet a nation’s demand for... nine whole hours.

Great work, amigos! Only 8,751 to go!

Ah, but at what cost, dear reader? There are no free lunches, as the saying goes, not even in Spain’s socialist utopia. And “net zero” doesn’t come for nothing. Still, that didn’t stop those who claim to know better from doing what they do worst: proposing solutions to problems they themselves caused.

Here’s gloating globalist newswire, Reuters, with a renewables update from a year ago...

Renewables produce almost 60% of Spain's electricity

July 2 (Reuters) - Spain generated almost 60% of its electricity from renewable energy sources in the first half of 2024 helped by new solar capacity and more output from hydropower plants, data from grid operator Redeia.

Renewables accounted for 51% of the total a year earlier.

And here’s EnergyNews with another optimistic update on the grand, green vision, this one from just a few months back:

Spain targets 81% renewable electricity by 2030

The Spanish government has set a target of generating 81% of its electricity from renewables by 2030, while stepping up its ambitions for green hydrogen.

Ah, everything seemed to be going so well... until the Spanish government finally tapped into what P. J. O’Rourke used to call, “mankind’s greatest renewable resource”...

…hubris.

Blackout Future

Here’s Bloomberg, tempting The Fates just a few weeks ago...

Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story

Plans to shut down all nuclear power plants by 2035 remain unchanged even as other countries delay closures and plan to build more.

Fast forward to this last weekend, when the Spaniards – and, by extension, their unfortunate Iberian cousins, the Portuguese – finally achieved net zero. Only, it wasn’t the kind they wanted.

The Weather Channel:

Huge Power Outage Strikes Spain, France, Portugal

A travel disaster played out Monday in several western European countries when a widespread blackout occurred in parts of Spain, France and Portugal. Subways went dark and traffic lights didn’t work, wreaking havoc in several large cities.

Continued

Public

’s Michael Shellenberger:

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.

As usual, it was ordinary, hard-working citizens, who were left to count the costs of their omniscient leader’s aversion to rational thought. Reuters...

A state of emergency was declared across many Spanish regions on Monday, with the deployment of 30,000 police. In Atocha station in Madrid, police and Red Cross workers handed out blankets and bottles of water.

In Barcelona on Tuesday morning, bars and restaurant owners counted the cost of lost produce after half a day of their fridges and freezers being off.

Maria Luisa Pinol, 63, owner of the Granja Isabel bar in the city, told Reuters late on Monday that she had been forced to temporarily close her doors.

"It’s impossible to serve food," she said. "(We’re) scared it will go bad, that we have to throw everything away. We don’t know if the insurance will cover it, and, that's an economic loss besides other things too."

Gone with the Wind

Having momentarily achieved their dystopian dream of Net Zero electricity, the policy wonks on the Iberian Peninsula are busy figuring out how to completely miss the lesson staring the in the face. Once more, from Reuters...

Spain is one of Europe's biggest producers of renewable energy, but Monday's shutdown has already sparked debate about whether the volatility of supply from solar or wind has made its power systems more vulnerable to such an outage.

John Kemp, an energy analyst and public policy specialist, said finding clear root causes for the sequence of failures that contributed to the blackout could take investigators several months.

“The region has one of the world’s highest penetrations of renewable generation from wind and solar so the blackout will be a case study of how renewable generators impact on reliability as well as restarting after widespread failure,” he said.

Central planning works... socialist utopias are real... printing money makes people rich...

Whatever the cause of this week’s massive blackout is determined to be – whether it is actual or merely manufactured – you can bet the proposed solution won’t be less state intervention and top down meddling.

Meanwhile, back in “downside-up” Argentina, a free market revolution is well and truly underway. We’ll return to the news from our adopted country later in the week.

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. It’s happening, dear reader. At this unique moment in history, we have access to tools that can spread the idea of liberty like never before.

State media outlets… government propaganda mills… bloviating presstitutes in the mainstream press… all are falling out of favor with common sense readers, who are turning to independent sources – like these humble Notes – for their information and ideas.

As such, we are especially grateful for the generous support of our dear members, who understand the importance of promoting free markets… free minds… and free people.

If you are not yet a member but would like to support the work we are doing here, please consider joining our growing community of critical thinkers, free market advocates and spiritual anarchists today.

The evolution is here. Join us today and share the news...