Spain’s blackout cover-up is a lesson in green spin

Once Spain emerged from noon-to-midnight blackout last month, few observers expected that the country could remain in the dark about the underlying policy fiasco. Some course correction loomed, they expected, to the “green transition” that had crippled our grid. An early poster child of “climate action”, our sunlit peninsula had spent two decades replacing fossil fuels and nuclear power with the unreliable primacy of renewables. Clear-eyed rectification was surely in order — no?

These hopes assumed that Spain’s rulers could concede error and change course. Yet the assumption has proven no more reliable than the energy mix the country had run on.

Granted, scientists had warned that a blackout-inducing solar “surge” was inevitable. But when it struck, chalking the outage up to a black swan event was always bound to be a convenient cop-out for our socialist executive. Smearing doubters and critics of its response as disinformation artists, in particular, echoed our Prime Minister’s routine dismissal of legal probes into his corrupt inner circle, which he claims rely on “fake news”. A whole other story, however, would be sparing our future energy mix from the reckoning. 

Energy realists worldwide are looking at our black Monday as a West-wide “solar Fukushima” — an inflection point that will push the pendulum back from two decades of green fanaticism towards a healthier, more resilient mix of power sources. Yet outside observers would be wrong to assume that the right lessons have been drawn from the Spanish power cuts. Our government’s spin campaign could become a playbook for green zealots elsewhere. By holding fast to dogma in the face of disaster, Spain’s left-wing leadership is proving that green follies are not just ungrounded in fact and reason but represent a sacrificial call to tolerate harm in pursuit of ideology.

Though Spain will likely keep championing Net Zero in the long-run, these spinmeisters may be influencing politicians elsewhere, too. As disasters of this sort proliferate, the playbook will likely be opened elsewhere: drown the disruption to people’s lives with bafflegab, cancel out dissenting views as unscientific and plough ahead to green utopia.

Days before the power outage, our grid had broken records of renewable input, standing at around 75 per cent that Monday. Its semi-public operator cheered the milestone, pledged further green inroads, and assured blackouts were out of the question. The former socialist housing minister chairing its board owes her role to the Prime Minister, as do scores of her toady colleagues. This sycophancy, which is widespread across the public sector, reinforces the fact-proof green echo chamber. Twenty days prior, before investors and the grid’s chairwoman at a conference in Madrid, the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Fatih Birol had urged Spain to reconsider its aggressive timeline of nuclear plant closures. After closing two in 2000 and 2006, the country plans to shut down the remaining five by 2035 — even as much of Europe travels in reverse.

Two weeks on, contra scientists, global fora, and the non-pliant media, the grid operator insists that the blackout was unrelated to the Spanish energy mix — instead blaming meagre connectivity to France for alleged design weaknesses. Borrowing from a Hispanophile Orwell, it claimed renewables make the grid more, not less, resilient. Both the grid’s management and the PM’s cabinet have come at nuclear “lobbyists” and the very energy companies that had warned that such a blackout would occur, accusing them of profiteering. On the Sunday after the event, our Deputy Prime Minister handling the “ecological transition” threatened the country with yet greener utopia, telling left-wing daily El País that “Spain will be green—or won’t be”.

The more obstinate, complacent mistruth is that renewables were not to blame for prolonging the blackout, but to thank for a speedy restoration of power for which the government craves credit. Dams, we have been told, were our last-resort savior, even as they never get respite from the green-conservationist agenda. Spain had last made world news with a cold drop around Valencia in October, made deathlier than it should have been by the years-long uprooting of hydrological infrastructure, meaning the roaring water went uncontained (more than 220 died).

The lack of a fierier response from the Spanish public is the product of a 20-year brainwashing project

This time, the cover-up’s aim is to nullify the role of nuclear power. Plugged on and off the grid on short notice, atomic power stations in most countries step in to balance out fluctuations from renewables. Had Spain’s not been operating at half-capacity under a crippling tax load, our plants would have stepped in just this way into the vacuum left by “surging” solar farms in our hot south — to say nothing of strengthening the grid year-round. Yet the grid’s authorities claim these plants are unreliable in nature, and the government is unwilling to revisit the closure timeline. While lobbying for greater interconnection with the French grid, the anti-nuclear camp overlooks that France’s role in helping restore power to Spain was mostly due to its world-class atomic power.

The lack of a fiery response from the Spanish public is the product of a 20-year brainwashing project. As part of the “green transition”, Spaniards have been taught to fear and loathe non-renewable energy. The groundwork was manifest in the blackout’s early hours, when Spaniards used what little signal remained on their phones to trade memes of an ogreish Vladimir Putin switching off the lights in retaliation for Spain’s support of Ukraine’s war effort. The conspiracy was so widely peddled that even the grid had to debunk it, preferring its green cover-up of the truth to an unrelated lie — as much as the government would have liked to deflect the blame to a cyber-attack.

It should come as no surprise that, once unleashed, whole-of-society, centralised agendas are less easy to scale back than one-off, stand-alone policy moves. They create lobbies, entrench private interests and public fealties, and instil popular prejudice along the way, helping radicals evade accountability when disaster strikes. The lesson from Spain concerns the necessity of scrapping Net Zero — as well as the broader risk of letting green dogma run rife. It’s a lesson the West should take even more seriously going forward.