Spain’s Impossible Dream of ‘Green’ Electricity
Updated Man of La Mancha lyrics could read: “To dream the impossible dream of clean, green, net-zero electricity, to fight the unbeatable foe of manmade climate cataclysms, we must run where the brave dare not go.”
Don Quixote saw windmills as malevolent and dangerous dragons. Spain’s governing classes view them from the Chinese perspective: benevolent and magical dragons.
They’ve erected over 22,000 gigantic windmills, to harness the wind and generate electricity. Portugal has nearly 3,000. Together, when conditions are perfect, they can generate almost 38 gigawatts.
Like Cervantes’ hero, the elites also want “to reach the unreachable star” – or at least capture the energy from one star: the sun. Spain and Portugal together also have 38 GW of photovoltaic solar panels.
However, the Iberian Peninsula neighbors have long ignored the dark sides of the forces they seek to commandeer.
Those wind turbines, solar panels and transmission lines sprawl across some 2,000,000 acres of Spanish and Portuguese vistas, habitats and croplands. That’s equal to Delaware and Rhode Island combined.
They kill eagles, bustards, vultures, and other raptors and birds. Building them requires mining, pollution and child labor on historically unprecedented scales. Solar panels are easily destroyed by storms.
Worst, they provide intermittent, weather-dependent electricity – necessitating expensive backup power and making the electrical grid unstable. Just how unstable was demonstrated recently, and dramatically.
On April 16, for the first time, for a few minutes, Spain generated 100% of its electricity with wind, solar and hydro power.
A fortnight later, on April 28, a prolonged blackout sent Iberia into chaos. Lights, televisions, refrigerators, cell phones and traffic lights went dark. Trains, subways and elevators trapped passengers. Airports canceled flights. Hospital backup power provided only basic and emergency services.
The outage even struck parts of France and Belgium. It was Europe’s biggest blackout ever. If France hadn’t shut off its connection to Spain’s cascading problems, all of Europe could have shut down.
Just a week later, another blackout hit Spain’s Canary Islands.
Power outages are nothing new. But the Spain-Portugal blackouts underscore fundamental problems with the supposedly “inevitable transition” from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear electricity to wind, solar and battery power.
They s
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
