Spain and Portugal power cuts leave EU refusing to ask one glaring question

OPINION

People outside Barcelona Sant rail station during the power cut (Image: AFP via Getty Images)

The widespread power cuts in Spain and Portugal this week caused chaos and exposed the risks of switching almost entirely to electricity to power our way of life – plus the possible perils of a wholly-renewable energy supply. Spain had upped its wind and solar power when blackouts struck, just days after its grid ran entirely on green power for the first time. And while it is too early to know definitively what caused the catastrophic Iberian outage, clearly, the ability to fall back on other forms of energy-generation like gas could have mitigated the impact of power cuts. 

The suspicion is falling on its rising use of renewable energy, with solar and wind reaching a peak of 64% of generation earlier this week before the crash. With a cyber-attack ruled out, it’s also been suggested that extreme temperatures might be to blame – but the weather was no warmer than in the UK.  What no one wants to question is Spain’s huge reliance on renewables as so much capital and political will has been invested in the net zero project. Neither the EU nor the left-wing media want this to be the explanation.

But energy experts believe the very nature of  renewable energy makes such blackouts more likely and more devastating at the same time. Gas, coal and hydroelectricity power turbines which keep turning even when the energy stops, creating inertia that cushions the impact of any power cuts. Solar and wind power mechanisms do not have inertia and so any cut in power rapidly escalates – shutting down the whole system.

But such is the widespread belief in net zero – akin to some religious faith – that the impracticalities of renewables have largely been overlooked in the determination to make them work, whatever the cost. Yet surely our advanced economies are too sophisticated to allow a faith-based energy system to predominate when, in our prosperous past, efficiency was the key word – both giving us cheaper and more reliable power? 

The very unpredictability of renewable power is its key weakness and our everyday lives should not be sacrificed on the altar of good intentions. The expanding use of electricity in our-day-to-day digitally-run lives is another weakness revealed by the Iberian power cuts. It was noticeable that cities almost completely ground to a halt. Shops and bars closed because their card readers didn’t work, whereas a society that still used cash would have been much more able to carry on. 

Restaurants could have stayed open, using gas hobs to cook meals. Petrol-powered cars would have outperformed battery driven ones – if the traffic lights had been working. Cash, candles and petrol, it turns out, are not so old fashioned when the lights go out. But an over-reliance on electricity is not only putting increased demand on our energy grids but also giving us very little room for when it fails. We should not be putting all our eggs in one basket and focusing instead on establishing resilient energy systems with multiple sources of power, including gas, coal and nuclear alongside renewables. 

Rushing headlong towards a net zero energy nirvana is reckless and puts us all at greater risk. Labour energy minister Ed Miliband should pay attention to what happened in Spain and Portugal because it is more likely to happen in the UK as he forces us away from carbon-generated power. 

Energy analyst Kathryn Porter says the UK grid is becoming increasingly unstable with its upper operational limit breached “500 times in each winter season” in the past four years and a major “near miss” nationwide blackout reported at the start of the year.

A series of Electricity Margin Notices were issued in January as  wind turbines failed to deliver sufficient power, leaving a spare margin of just 580MW on the 46,825GW needed to power Britain – and that’s after our gas reserves had been fired up at enormous cost. Our reliance on electricity is becoming too strong now for Ed Miliband to gamble on an inherently unstable system. Political virtue signalling is becoming too much of a risk for it to carry on unchallenged. The Conservative Party and Reform have already ditched the helter-skelter race towards net zero as impractical.

It is time for our government to study this latest continental outage and learn the right lessons from it. If we don’t pull back from the net zero abyss, we may all face a very dark future.