VALENCIA, Spain — Two modern ills converged in Europe on Monday, literally one of the darkest days in decades. An ideological obsession with climate fanaticism left countries without power for hours, while censorship of “disinformation, ”often information the powerful don’t like, plunged the population in an informational blackout in subsequent days.
The electrical blackout brought planes, trains, and automobiles to a screeching halt throughout Spain, Portugal, and small parts of southern France. Electricity simply stopped flowing, and with it control towers, rail lines, and traffic lights.
Cellphones became quadrangular black boxes that did nothing and lost their “smartness.”
A political conference I was attending in this sunny Mediterranean port city suddenly became eerie when people started coming in and out and whispering to each other. One person in the seat in front finally turned and enlightened a friend and me: “The electricity is down. We’re cut off from the world.”
We then realized that, yes, sirens had been wailing outside, and it had been a while since we’d gotten emails or texts. A generator in the hotel kept our conference going, but nothing else worked; everyone had to take the stairs and use bathrooms in the dark — though water, too, stopped working.
It wasn’t quite dystopic, but our modern dependence on electricity and its creature comforts suddenly was brought home to us.
Many speculated that it was a cyberattack from Russia or China. Who else had the power to do this? Center-right politicians from across Europe were about to descend on Valencia the next day. Surely, an invitation for bad actors to do their thing.
Well, not so fast. Neither Russia’s Vladimir Putin nor China’s Xi Jinping is above carrying out this type of attack, and cybersecurity is a serious matter. But, to quote Vice President JD Vance at a February conference in Munich, Germany, the threat to worry about the most in Europe “is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor.”
“What I worry about,” went on Vance, “is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its fundamental values.”
Vance mentioned Europe’s need “to enjoy affordable energy,” and the fact that, as he put it, “free speech, I fear, is in retreat.” European officials are still fuming about how “rude” that young Vance was, but it looks like he was on the money.
It is increasingly clear that what caused the blackout was not a cyberattack. Reuters News agency reported that Spain’s grid operator Red Electrica on Tuesday ruled out external sabotage, and said instead that it had identified two “incidents of power generation loss, probably from solar plants,” in southwestern Spain.
That, said the Reuters report, “caused instability in the electric system and led to a breakdown of its connection with France. The electrical system collapsed, affecting both the Spanish and Portuguese systems.”
“There was not enough inertia, or redundancy, in the system to keep it going,” my colleague Diana Furchott-Roth emailed from Washington when I was able to receive communications from the outside world. “The last coal-fired plant was closed on April 12.”
Diana has been warning about this type of thing for decades, and Spain’s socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez is a poster boy for the things she has warned against. His government has not only closed coal-fired plants, but has been busily destroying nuclear plants as well.
“Net zero,” or zero CO2 emissions, is the name of this new mad delusion, and Spain’s infantile leftists have been posting on social media gleeful workers destroying nuclear power plants. The goal has been 100% percent “renewable” generation.
Well, they happened to have gotten very close to their holy grail on Monday at 12:30. The Iberian Peninsula’s power grid was getting a disproportionate amount of energy from the renewables loved by the Left: 80% percent from solar photovoltaic, solar thermal and wind. Nuclear was at a measly 11% percent.
In a mere five minutes, solar photovoltaic generation plunged by 50%, from 18 gigawatts to eight, according to Reuters. Iberia and adjacent parts of France, including the tiny Pyrenean principality of Andorra, all of which depended on this grid, then descended into darkness at 12:35, from which it was not to recover till late at night.
The hapless Sanchez was still arguing late Tuesday that just because Red Electrica was discounting a cyberattack, it did not mean that one hadn’t happened.
Governments finding themselves in a corner will lie, or at least equivocate, and it’s the job of the opposition to keep asking for answers. “An energy policy that prioritizes the fight against climate change above the security of supply has provoked this general blackout,” said an analysis on the site of the think tank Disenso, which is linked to the opposition Vox Party (full disclosure, I sit on Disenso’s foreign advisory board).
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But it is also the job of the media. Yet Spain’s state television stations, and even private ones, were still keeping the truth about the failure of the Left’s renewable dream from getting any airtime as late as Wednesday morning, when I left for the airport. That was left to radio and to some newspapers on the right.
An honest media would be not just informing voters about how a blackout that left at least five dead and stopped a modern economy in its tracks happened. It would also be debating whether such a modern society really does want to stop using comfort creatures and working toilets, all in the name of fighting climate change.
