Quote of the Day
At about midday on Monday, April 28, large power outages left millions of homes and businesses in Spain and Portugal without power. The countries were in chaos, with traffic snarled, flights grounded, and subway stations across the country without power. Mobile phone and internet networks went down. Hospitals stopped procedures and used generators to administer to patients. Around 12:15 p.m., demand for electricity in Spain dropped from 27,500 megawatts to nearly 15,000 megawatts in about 5 seconds. Portugal’s outage hit its capital, Lisbon, and surrounding areas, as well as northern and southern parts of the country. Even homes in the French Basque Country were without power for a few minutes.
Institute for Energy Research
April 29, 2025
What Caused Spain and Portugal’s Massive Power Outage? – IER
A significant contributor to the outage was due to politics:
Spain and Portugal are both highly reliant upon generation from wind and solar power, and many are pointing towards their deficiencies as the possible reason for the outage, although governments are denying any linkage.
…
Wind and solar power, in addition to their intermittency and hidden costs, are unable to provide inertia to the grid, which thermal plants, which have been forced to retire, provide.
Meanwhile:
London Underground: Power failure knocks out Tubes, Overground and Elizabeth line
A power failure has caused major disruption to the London Underground network and the Elizabeth line.
The Bakerloo line is currently suspended, as are parts of the Mildmay line, while there are delays on the Elizabeth, Jubilee, District, Circle and Piccadilly lines.
Earlier, sections of the Northern, Jubilee, Waterloo & City and Elizabeth lines were also shut.
Transport for London (TfL) said the issues had been caused by a short power cut which happened at about 14:30 BST. Power has since been restored, but delays and line suspensions are ongoing.
Regarding the situation in Spain and Portugal, I like to think a cloud momentarily blocked the sun, but that seems unlikely for this large of an event.
Still, when I heard about this, I could not help but think this is like a chapter from Atlas Shrugged.
Also, of extreme interest to Barb and I, is that if this had happened four weeks earlier, we would have been on an electric train in Spain cruising through the countryside at 155 -> 165 MPH then slowed to a stop in the middle of nowhere.
It is good we have been doing all the travel we can before we have to retreat to Galt’s Gulch.
So……that’s a “daytime only”* train? I guess that simplifies the passenger bookings and train staffing somewhat…..
* when it’s not cloudy, of course.
The entire country lost power.
Anyone that says the elites aren’t insane simply isn’t serious enough to be in a conversation with.
And not one of those morons ever gets that humans can never produce enough CO2 to change anything on this planet.
Or maybe they do and are evil enough to want blackouts? Desiring human misery?
Wither through evil criminal intent or evil criminal negligence. Blackouts are the future of all solar/wind-based grids.
After the call heard in New York during the 77′ blackout. “it’s Christmas time!” Arson and looting that ensued tells the story of an eco-friendly future.
I guess the real question is if all the government/elitist run data centers and super computers went down also?
Something tells me they didn’t.
Do they want blackouts, and human misery, and death? Yes, some of them definitely do. They will tell you if you listen carefully.
Climate has changed ever since the Earth acquired an atmosphere and will continue to change so long as it continues to have one. Ask any dinosaur. There is ample data saying that recent minor temperature increases are just more of the same fluctuations that have occurred since the last ice age. And by the way, during the last ice age the temperature fluctuations were quite a lot larger.
Another thing to remember is that the favorite reference port for warmist cult shamans is vaguely called “pre-industrial times” but actually is 1850. Why 1850? Maybe because it is within a fraction of a degree of the coldest time in the past 8000 years. The temperatures right now are roughly average for that period, and in the times of Leif Eriksson, never mind Julius Caesar, it was noticeably warmer than right now.
On solar power: some of the discussion I have seen talks about the need for power sources to be exactly synchronized. Conventional generators achieve that in part by mechanical inertia. Solar and wind generators use inverters, which have no inertia, so they need to use high quality phase locked loops that don’t unlock during power fluctuations. The implication is that a small scale issue, like a cloud, can unlock those loops and trigger a cascade of failures. The NY ’77 blackout was one of those, where the sync failure was large enough to break things in spite of inertia — the power line frequency dropped enough for people with perfect pitch to notice record players slowing down, just before the lights went out.
Phase lock loops! It has been a long time since I have known someone other than my brother who knew what a PLL is.
With the recent revelation that the commies in Beijing have deliberately had wi fi/cellular access devices installed into countless solar panels, inverters and other devices around the world needed for solar power to function the logical question to ask is was this a “test” by the CCP to see what they could do to a country’s power grid of they decided to meddle….
Only tangentially related via the Atlas Shrugged reference, I saw this the other day
https://www.kimdutoit.com/2025/05/16/forests-and-thickets/
and immediately thought of one of my favorite quotes from same:
“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kinds of **laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted**—and you create a nation of lawbreakers—and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”
(asterisks mine for emphasis)