What The Spanish Blackout Says About Renewable Energy In The U.S.

Commuters milling around the darkened Madrid-Chamartin station on April 28, 2025.
Like most Americans, with the exception of a soccer match every now and then, I could give a flying handshake about what's happening day-to-day on the Iberian Peninsula. However, the recent blackout, which shut off power to over 55 million people in three countries within five seconds, caught my attention for its implications for the future of renewable energy in the U.S.
Renewables promise ample electricity with a low carbon footprint and a low price point, especially compared to coal, so it is no wonder that wind and solar have seen such a huge growth in capacity over the last generation.
Note how quickly the green wedge representing wind power grows starting at around the turn of the ... More century. Solar growth started about 10 years late but is on the same trajectory.
Critics of renewables will rightly point out that renewables are cheap as long as battery storage is not included in their price, and the sudden collapse of an entire electric grid for 12 hours incurs a staggering economic burden that should be priced into cost calculations.
Supporters of renewables argue that the problem is not renewables themselves, but insufficient or outdated control, distribution and storage equipment on the grid. If we spend more money on storage and transmission, everything will be hunky-dory.
My intuition was that both arguments held water. Critics are right to include the cost of storage to the low cost of renewables because electricity is an on-demand commodity--it must be there even when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. That said, supporters are right that including the long-term cost of further unbalancing the planet's natural carbon cycle, the 'low' cost of continued fossil fuel consumption is an illusion.
Since the blackout, which occurred at the end of April, I've been speaking with Dr. Lorenzo Kristov, one of the world's top experts on grid architecture, and combing through reams of articles on power engineering.
I concluded that both critics and supporters of renewable energy are wrong.
Both sides are trying to fix current problems with the same mindset that created the problems in the first place: Industrial Revolution thinking.
The Industrial Revolution paradigm centralizes production and relies upon long and ultimately fragile supply and distribution chains that are vulnerable to changes in environmental factors. As we head deeper into the post-Climate era, long supply and distribution chains will inevitably face accelerating disruption.
Nearly 90% of natural gas processing, fractionation, and storage is concentrated in four regions in the U.S., each subject to various environmental hazards that will incur greater complications and costs as climate change exacerbates natural disasters' frequency and severity. Although concentrating gas production in these areas is efficient (the ultimate goal of the Industrial Revolution paradigm), it results in long, fragile supply and distribution chains.
Centralized production allows for economies of scale so is very efficient. However, resiliency is ... More low due to geographical concentration.
Similarly, building enormous solar and wind farms deep in flyover country necessitates enormous expenditures on fancy new storage equipment and mechanical devices to manage voltage and grid frequency, and new high-voltage DC transmission lines. All this spending creates exactly the same sort of fragile supply and distribution chains we see in natural gas. Indeed, the root cause of the Iberian grid's failure on a clear, windy day when 70% of Spain's generation capacity was coming from renewables was the Spanish grid's inability to gracefully handle such a surplus of renewables generation.
Modern-day grids are trying to cram the power train for a Tesla Roadster alongside the internal combustion drivetrain of a 1959 Edsel, then take this hybrid Frankencar off-roading.
It is time for a new paradigm.
Kristov and his colleagues have developed a paradigm that envisions individual towns and regions forming self-reliant mini-grids that can attach and detach from the larger grid network as needed. While this architecture would not have prevented the equipment failure that triggered the Iberian Blackout, it would have isolated the problem from the rest of the system, keeping the outage local rather than allowing it to proliferate nationwide.
This model upsets the way incumbents competing in electrical generation, transmission, and distribution have been doing business for the last 120 years. Challenging a network of longtime monopolies and their corresponding political structures is tough, even though it's the right thing to do. We need renewable energy in the U.S. Intelligent investors take note.
Those interested in a detailed analysis of the causes of the Iberian Blackout and a plain-language explanation of modern grid function and management, please see my recently published research report.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Bloomberg

6 hours ago

• Bloomberg

Trump Says Spain Has to Pay as NATO Seeks Deal on Spending

By Updated on Save NATO allies are pressing Spain to sign on to a stepped-up defense spending target and end a holdout that US President Donald Trump portrayed as unacceptable. Ahead of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit starting Tuesday that Trump is scheduled to attend, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is the only leader who's outright opposed to the proposal to raise outlays to 5% of gross domestic product.

Yahoo

8 hours ago

• Yahoo

Trump says America has ‘too many' national holidays and they're hurting the economy. Is he right?

President Donald Trump on Thursday called for fewer federal holidays, saying the days off cost America billions of dollars in losses. 'Too many non-working holidays in America. It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed,' Trump said in a Truth Social post on Juneteenth, a newly designated federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged during a Thursday briefing with reporters that it was a federal holiday and thanked reporters for showing up, but declined to answer whether Trump was doing anything to mark it. 'The workers don't want it either!' Trump said of federal holidays in his post. 'Soon we'll end up having a holiday for every once working day of the year. It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!' Is there any truth to his comments? Yes and no. Most research around the economic impact of federal holidays deals with how worker productivity is impacted. Worker productivity measures how much workers are able to achieve over a given period of time. A day off work, therefore, would put worker productivity at zero. But research suggests that it's not just, say, July 4 itself that causes productivity to slump. It's the days before and after, since workers tend to schedule time off around them, leaving employees who opted not to take those days off with heavier workloads, thus reducing their productivity. A 2022 study by two economists found that when a federal holiday falls on a weekend and isn't rescheduled for a weekday, the nation's total output, or gross domestic product, increases by 0.08% to 0.2% relative to when it is rescheduled. Among the sectors that can take the biggest hit from federal holidays is manufacturing, the study found. But that's just in the short term. Over the longer term, paid time off, including over federal holidays, increases worker morale and can make them more productive over time. That's because people who work more aren't necessarily more productive, since they are more likely to get burnt out. Case in point: Fresh research from Microsoft found workers are struggling to cope with a 'seemingly infinite workday,' involving an increasing load of meetings occurring outside traditional working hours. One outcome is that one-third of workers feel it has been 'impossible to keep up' with the pace of work over the past five years, according to a Microsoft-commissioned survey of 31,000 employees around the world, cited a Tuesday report. Meanwhile, an older internal survey Ernst & Young conducted found that for every 10 additional hours of vacation employees took, their performance reviews increased by 8%. Furthermore, those who took time off more frequently were less likely to leave the firm. Contrary to Trump's comments, businesses across the economy don't shut down entirely on federal holidays: Plenty of workers, including emergency responders, retail and transportation workers, continue to work on such days. On the spending front, consumers tend to make more purchases on holidays, especially as businesses schedule sales around them. Specifically, the tourism, hospitality and retail sectors tend to benefit the most. But it's not just big businesses — small businesses can benefit, too. A 2018 study found that bank holidays in the United Kingdom give small shops an average of an additional £253 (about $340) in profit. CNN's Anna Cooban contributed reporting.

Bloomberg

12 hours ago

• Bloomberg

NATO Allies Seek to Sway Spain Toward Trump-Led Spending Target

NATO allies are pressing Spain to end its holdout on a stepped-up defense spending target that's one of US President Donald Trump's key demands for an alliance summit next week. Ambassadors of NATO member countries held inconclusive talks in Brussels on Friday, which are expected to continue into the weekend, according to people familiar with the talks who asked for anonymity to discuss the closed-door meetings. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte is negotiating directly with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, the people said.