Spain’s Blackout Shows the Regime Can’t Be Bothered With Affordable, Reliable Power
There’s a lot of conflicting information about the immediate cause of the recent mega-blackouts in Spain and Portugal. The governments in those countries claim the causes are “still unclear” after the largest blackouts in history. Given the rather spotty record of truth-telling by national governments, I suspect the causes of the blackouts are clear to those who are in a position to know.
What we on the outside do know, though, is that Spain and Portugal, like most European states, have spent years trying to replace tried and true energy sources with more unreliable and costly sources of energy in the name of “net zero” or the “European Green Deal“
Some critics of Europe’s fashionable policies on renewable energy have suggested that the blackouts are to be expected given Europe’s reckless pursuit of unreliable energy sources such as solar and wind power. Today, for example, Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform UK Party, predicted that “the lights are going to go out here too” if Britain carries on with “renewable lunacy.”
A symbol of this policy could be the 2022 destruction of Teruel’s thermoelectric coal power plant in Spain. Rather than modernize the plant or replace it with a cleaner-burning coal plant, the plant was decommissioned and then demolished in 2022 as part of Europe’s drive toward “renewable” energy. As described by an article expressing approval of Spain’s transition away from traditional (and very reliable) power sources:
Over the course of its existence, the 1.1 GW plant produced 224,000 GWh, the equivalent of the energy consumption of the entire Iberian Peninsula for a whole year. After forty years, the age of coal is over for Andorra and the time of renewable energy has begun.
In the near future, the area will become a “hybrid” hub, with solar plants, wind farms, battery storage systems and a green hydrogen factory.
This sort of thing, of course, has been going on all o
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