From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

AEP is getting ever more desperate to defend his green energy agenda.

In his latest piece in the Telegraph, he tries to blame the blackouts in Spain on the Socialist Government, while ignoring the green elephant in the room:

The stench of a cover-up hangs over Spain’s giant blackout, the worst electricity failure in any developed country in modern times.

Faith in the current investigation has reached rock-bottom. The socialist government of Pedro Sánchez is trying to buy time with explanations that either make no technical sense or veer into absurdity.

Red Eléctrica, which runs the grid, is accused of stonewalling everybody.

Sources in Brussels have told The Telegraph that the authorities were conducting an experiment before the system crashed, probing how far they could push reliance on renewables in preparation for Spain’s rushed phase-out of nuclear reactors from 2027.

The government seems to have pushed the pace recklessly, before making the necessary investments in a sophisticated 21st-century smart grid capable of handling it.

Full story here.

I don’t know what this secret experiment was. There has been no secret about the rapid rollout of wind and solar capacity in recent years. As most of this is embedded, the Spanish grid have no means of controlling it.

I don’t recall AEP writing in the past that this insanely fast rollout should be stopped until billions had been spent strengthening the grid. Nor, for that matter, have I seen the same warnings about Miliband’s equally reckless pursuit of Clean Power 2030 here.

Nor is there any evidence that his so-called smart grid would have stopped the blackouts, which energy experts, unlike those with a green agenda like AEP, have been warning about for years.

While we await the official verdict, it seems clear that a surge in solar power at a local level overloaded the grid, which, partly due to a lack of inertia, quickly spread across the country.

AEP then goes on to accuse energy experts of conflating inertia and intermittency:

“Foes of green energy like to mix up the inertia problem with the separate issue of what happens when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. The short-term answer is batteries, cryogenic compressed air and interconnectors. Spain lacks enough of any of them.”

In fact they are both intricately related. It is the inherent uncontrollable variability of wind and solar power that can trigger problems in the first place, and it is lack of inertia which then makes it much more difficult to contain the problem afterwards.

With a grid based on dispatchable power, neither issue is a problem.

Note too that yet again he is off in Fantasyland, claiming that batteries and compressed air can solve the problem of intermittency, when they are designed just to fill in for a few minutes or so.

He is right about one thing though – there will be a cover up, but just not the one he imagines. My guess is that the mad rush to renewable energy will be absolved of any blame, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.