The recent blackout across Spain and Portugal wasn’t just a technical glitch – it was a red warning light flashing across Europe’s energy transition dashboard.
As solar panels soaked up the Iberian sun, the grid simply couldn’t cope. Within five seconds, 15GW vanished. Lights flickered out, transport froze, and confidence in renewable reliability took a body blow. The incident exposed an uncomfortable truth: in our rush to decarbonise, we’re ignoring the basic physics of energy stability.
Style over substance?
Critics have been quick to point fingers at Red Eléctrica, Spain’s grid operator. But scapegoating masks the deeper systemic flaw: a policy culture obsessed with optics over resilience. Solar is clean and increasingly cheap – a political darling. But it is also volatile, intermittent, and, as this episode shows, dangerous when it dominates the grid without proper backup.
Only 5GW of Spain’s scheduled 26GW output came from “firm” sources – the sort of dependable generation that keeps frequency stable when the sun ducks behind a cloud. That imbalance is the real scandal. Not the existence of solar, but the failure to prepare the system for its quirks.
Spain is a global poster child for renewables. That should be celebrated. But last week’s blackout reveals how dangerously thin the line is between ambition and arrogance. The push to phase out nuclear while betting the house on sunshine is politically seductive – but technologically naïve.
Nuclear power is a must
Even grid veterans like André Merlin and Jorge Sanz are urging a rethink. Nuclear power, battery storage, cross-border links – these aren’t luxuries, they’re essential kit. Without them, we risk building a green utopia on foundations of sand.
Pedro Sánchez wants renewables to power 80 per cent of Spain’s electricity by 2030. Fine – but that journey must be grounded in engineering, not ideology. This was a warning, not a failure. But if leaders fail to heed it, next time the lights might not come back on so quickly.
Realism required
The lesson? Renewables alone won’t power the future – not safely, not reliably. It’s time for grown-up energy policy: diverse, balanced and brutally realistic.
