Commentary
Three weeks ago, all of Spain was startled by a complete electricity blackout without warning. Air traffic control could not contact airplanes, trains stalled in stations or stopped on their tracks mid-journey, telecommunications were knocked out, and a national emergency was declared. These blackouts spread into southern France and Portugal, conveying the regrettable and apparently unsuspected message that if one nation mismanages its grid, it takes its neighbours down with it.
It appears almost certain that the cause of these blackouts was Spain’s hyperactive green energy policies, and the disruption that occurred, unless preventive avoidance measures are taken, was a sobering glimpse into the future for the more environmentally militant countries. Portugal’s grid operator initially blamed the blackouts on “anomalous oscillations” in long-distance high-voltage lines. This supposedly caused an “induced atmospheric variation,” which in turn generated failures of synchronization and power disturbances across the entire European system. Of course, this explanation is incomprehensible even to specialists and appears to be a jumble of technical terms crafted to muddy the political waters about what really happened and who is to blame for it….