Climatewire | Spain and Portugal were still in the dark Monday when the Secretary of Energy of the United States, Chris Wright, went to television to blame a generalized blackout of renewable energy.
“It is very sad to see what happened to Portugal and Spain and so many people there. But you know, when you hook your wagon to the weather, it is just a risky effort,” Wright told CNBC.
The comment represented a finely auctioned slide in the wind and solar energy, which boosted almost three quarters of the Spanish network at the time it darkened. The comments contrasted with those made by the CEO of the Spanish network operator, who said that “final conclusions” had not arrived for interruption.
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But they fit a broader pattern for Wright, a former oil field services executive who has tried to paint wind and solar wind as expensive and unreliable energy sources that threaten the reliability of the electricity grid.
Renewable energies could have played a role in an interruption that left dozens of millions without energy, Grid experts said. But they warned against conclusions, saying that a series of systematic factors were probably needed for two countries to get angry in five seconds on Monday.
“What I would say is that this has the characteristics of being a very complicated event,” said Eamon Lannoye, managing director of Europe at the Electric Power Research Institute, who works with the public service industry. “It is not going to cut and dry.”
The disasters of the network have become political fodder in recent years, feeding debates on the role of intermittent resources such as wind and solar energy.
In 2021, when a winter storm crashed into Texas, Governor Greg Abbott (R) hastened to blame the wind and wind for the blackouts left 4.5 million without energy. An investigation carried out by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission concluded that the State’s energy system was insufficiently winterized to survive such a storm. It affected much of the fault of the state natural gas system, which reported a wide duration of the event.
“I have seen this play book: the first day, the fault of renewable energies. Then the events leave six months later,” said Michael Webber, a professor who studies the energy industry at the University of Texas in Austin. “There is always more in history.”
People wait in line to buy groceries in a dark store during a generalized energy cut that hit Spain and Portugal around noon on Monday, with the cause still unknown in Lisbon, Portugal, on April 28, 2025.
Stringer/Anadolu through Getty Images
Wright has or the tasks point to the duration of renewable energies their time in office.
In their welcome comments to the employees of the Department of Energy, the growing energy costs attributed in Europe to solar and wind energy. A few months later, at a Houston industry conference, he said that all that wind and solar generation increased, energy prices have followed.
Wright took CNBC on Monday from Poland, where he had gone to announce an agreement to help the country build its first nuclear energy plant. The presenter of CNBC, Brian Sullivan, asked him if the blackout in Spain and Portugal had led to the understanding “Are we going to need a lot of power of all the different types of sources?”
Wright did not explicitly mention wind and solar energy in his response, but said that the percentage of world gross internal products was falling due to “exhaustive and unreliable energy.”
“It’s a choice, but it’s a bad choice,” he said.
Andrea Woods, DO spokesman, said Wright was answering a question about the need to diversify energy supplies. “I wasn’t doing an evaluation about the cause of the blackout,” he said.
Experts say there are challenges with the management of a electricity network with growing amounts of renewable resources. Network operators must maintain supply and demand in a constant balance to maintain the electric frequency and inertia of the system. That is easier to see with traditional resources such as coal, gas and nuclear, which depend on large rotating turbines, said Pratheeksha Ramdas, Rystad Energy analyst.
Wind and solar facilities can be equipped with rotating turbines that provide these services, but few are currently, he said. The batteries can be used to stabilize the frequency, but their deployment in Spain and Portugal is limited.
“It is still early to establish definitive lessons, since the complete research is in progress. However, the event highlights some broad challenges, particularly the need for rapid and flexible support systems for waterfall prevention of written failures.”
The interruptions in Spain and Portugal begged shortly after 12:30 pm on Monday, when a generalized interruption of the generation in southwest Spain occurred, said Eduardo Prieto, CEO of Red Electric, the Spanish network operator.
The system responded to the interruption, but was beaten with another interruption of the generation 1.5 seconds later, he said. That caused an interruption in energy flows between Spain and France and a wide disconnection of renewable resources in the network. In five seconds, the voltage of the entire system was zero.
When asked at a press conference on Tuesday if the renewable energies had contributed to the interruption, Prieto said it was “premature to make any pronouncement”, but said that the network operator is investigating a wide generation output in the southwest.
“Given the southwest region I mentioned, it is very possible that the affected generation can be solar, but as I said, without the information, we cannot conclude anything definitely,” he said.
Webber, the Texas professor, said he was struggling to understand how a sudden loss of energy generation, particularly a solar installation, could trigger such a generalized interruption. Electric grilles are designed to resist losses of generation of large electric plants. Traditionally, these standards are designed to resist a large nuclear energy plant that shoots offline, which would lead to a great interruption in the frequency and inertia of the electricity grid.
That “a solar farm offline should have caused so many problems, which seems suspicious to me,” said Webber, who previously worked for a great French utility. “Something happened there that I can’t live explain.”
Lannoye de Epri echoed that evaluation. The most likely explanation is that the control systems, which connect the electrical plants with the network, probably fail in a series of facilities. That was the case in 2019, when a ray hit a wind farm on the high seas and a natural gas plant in the United Kingdom. The control systems in these electrical plants did not work, precipitating a series of events that led to an energy cut that affected 1 million people.
But there is not enough information to determine why these systems could have failed in the case of Spain and Portugal, or if there was a moment of guilt, he said.
“It is too early to issue a judgment, and it will certainly not seal the fate of one technology or another,” said Lannoye. “If a blackout had sealed the fate of a technology before, we would already have gas, we would not have coal, we would have nuclear. We would not have options.”
This story also appears Energywire
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