By H. Sterling Burnett.
The countrywide power outage Spain and Portugal experienced this week, which also shut down parts of France, is a powerful lesson in the dangers of relying on renewable power, in this case, especially solar, for grid-scale electric provision.
We in the United States have had previews of this over the past decade, with regular outages being experienced each summer in California, America’s leader in government mandated wind and solar use, and in my home state of Texas, where a winter outage – not peak power season in Texas by the way – killed more than 200 people. The primary reason for the Texas power failure was the huge, rapid drop-off in politically favored wind and solar power delivered to the grid.
Spain and Portugal, even more than the rest of Europe, went all in on renewable energy, closing reliable traditional power…
