Spain’s Grid Collapsed in 5 Seconds. The U.S. Could Be Next.
Across Spain and Portugal, more than 50 million people recently experienced the largest blackout in modern European history. Thousands of commuters stood stranded on the concourses of Spain’s transit system. In the span of five seconds, 60 percent of the country’s electricity supply vanished. This wasn’t caused by a storm or a cyberattack—just bad policy and the most underappreciated force in modern engineering giving way: inertia.
When a power plant trips offline or demand suddenly spikes, the power grid has no cushion; it must respond instantly or it unravels. That’s where inertia comes in. In coal, gas, and nuclear plants, massive turbine rotors spin at thousands of rpm. Even when power is cut, they keep turning, releasing stored energy that slows frequency shifts and buys precious time—seconds to a minute—for backup to kick in. It’s not backup power, it’s breathing room. Like the flywheel on a Peloton, it keeps things steady even when input falters.
Once frequency drops too far, automatic protection kicks in. Plants shut down. Substations isolate. The grid severs its own limbs to survive. If imbalance spreads faster than recovery can respond, the collapse cascades. Entire regions go dark—not for lack of power, but lack of time. Even the right answer, a minute late, is no answer at all.
That’s what happened in Spain. On April 28, solar energy was generating nearly 18 gigawatts of electricity—more than half of the national demand. Within an hour, more than two-thirds of it disappeared due to what authorities called a “technical fluctuation.” Grid frequency plummeted. France tried to send emergency power across the intertie, but the imbalance tripped the connection. In five seconds, the entire Iberian grid collapsed.Â
Experts/government regulators are unsure if solar power alone caused the failure. But a system hell-bent on pushing renewables certainly ensured that the failure was catastrophic. This wasn’t bad luck. It was bad policy made manifest—a sequence I’ve come to call the Four Horsemen of Grid Failure:
- Subsidized volatility. Between 2018 and 2024, Spain tripled its solar capacity, adding over 20 gigawatts in record time. The boom was fueled by E.U. Green Deal money, domestic tax credits, generous feed-in tariffs, and guaranteed priority access. Renewables didn’t compete—they were legally first in line. By midday, solar routinely overwhelmed the grid, forcing other power plants offline. And when it disappeared, as it did that day, there was nothing steady underneath.
- Penalized reliability. In just two years, Spain shut down 15 coal plants—including Teruel and Compostilla II, which together delivered over 2
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