The catastrophic electricity outage in Spain and Portugal earlier this week should serve as a wake-up call for the bloc’s officials
It was probably the weather that triggered the ten-hour breakdown of all utilities on the Iberian Peninsula earlier this week.
It was also the weather that has turned Germany into Europe’s top CO2 emitter. There are days when the sun does not shine, and the wind does not blow. And then the backup is coal in the absence of nuclear power or natural gas (from Russia).
The issue is transmission, not generation, of energy
An even bigger threat to the grid, however, stems from overproduction of electricity due to too much sun and wind. Both Spain and Germany proudly point out their statistics in terms of power generation based on huge onshore and offshore wind farms and extensive photovoltaic panels, often constructed on precious arable soil. Spain and Portugal are champions of green energy in the EU, and were sourcing 80 percent of their electricity from renewables just before the outage hit on Monday.
The larger underlying problem is in transmitting rather than generating electricity. Large parts of the existing grids in the EU were constructed in the 1950 and 1960s, when it was fairly easy to build infrastructure in the post-war towns. When Angela Merkel announced her ambitious energy transition, Peter Altmaier, the head of the Chancellor’s office announced the building of several thousands of kilometers of “electricity highways” (Strom Autobahnen). The slated budget was one trillion euros. But that budget was never established and nobody in Merkel’s government calculated the years for administrative planning and implementation.
So, the new grid was never built, neither in Germany nor elsewhere. The current grid is not made for to absorb constantly increasing volumes. The “electrification” of all forms of energy production and consumption, above all in mobility, poses a serious problem for the stability of the existing grids. Electric vehicles were supposed to replace cars with the traditional internal combustion engines. The hype surrounding the electric car has already died down. Customers simply refrain from buying an electric car. But the ambitious green agendas rarely take into account serious investments and above all solid timeframes for an enlarged electrical grid.
The European electrical grid stretches from Türkiye across the European continent to North Africa. Its technical name is Continental European Synchronous Area, and it is vulnerable. It is fed with an alternating current with a frequency of approximately 50 Hertz. In case of an overload, as probably happened on Monday in Spain, the risk is high that the frequency is destabilised. In order to pre-empt a power cut, since power plants will automatically shut down, the overload is sent abroad. Some voices claim that the Iberian Peninsula lacks interconnectors, while others warn against more interconnectors since this would only put the entire grid at risk, a domino blackout across more than 30 countries.
In 2012, the Austrian writer Marc Elsberg published his thriller “Blackout.” The plot describes a fictional 13-day power outage and the ensuing total breakdown of life as we know it. In the well-researched book, the blackout is caused by a cyber-attack. Many commentators eagerly suggested that one was behind the real-world crisis on Monday. Apparently, no one is ready to discuss the problem with the grid and green deal ambitions.
Attending energy conferences for years and teaching the topic of geopolitics of energy, I often wondered about the romantic fantasy models that Brussels officials and other climate experts presented. For the last 15 years, we witness an inflationary concept of “energy transition” or even worse, zero-carbon economy. Throughout the entire EU we have seen a focus on climate change. The approach lacks a solid energy policy, one which covers security in supply, affordability, and investments into grids.
New vulnerability due to the boom of renewables
I expected a major blackout to happen in Germany, rather than on the Iberian Peninsula.
The so-called energy transition declared by the Angela Merkel government in spring 2011 did not deliver at all. In the first quarter of 2025, instead of more electricity from wind and sun, more electricity was generated from coal and gas. Easter week also showed why the so-called energy transition is causing problems.
Despite the record expansion of wind and solar power, renewables are producing less electricity than at any time since 2021. Compared to the first quarter of last year, the amount of electricity produced by renewables in the same period this year fell by 16 percent.
The wind was not particularly strong in February and March. Electricity production from offshore wind turbines fell by a total of 31 percent, while production on land fell by 22 percent. As a result, electricity production from coal, oil, and gas had to be drastically increased. The logical consequence: CO2 emissions have risen dramatically. Electricity in Germany was dirtier than it had been since the winter of 2018.
However, it is not only in the medium term that the energy transition is not doing what its supporters believe it should. Easter week exemplifies all the problems associated with the plan to switch Germany’s energy production to mainly wind and solar.
On a sunny Easter Sunday, for example, the five million or so solar installations in Germany produced far more electricity than would have been needed to cover demand during the holiday.
However, electricity must be consumed exactly when it is produced, otherwise the electricity grid may be disrupted. This applies both nationally and to the local electricity grids on site and the regional capacities of the weather-dependent energy sources.
Due to the gigantic oversupply – 15 gigawatts too much, the output of a dozen average nuclear power plants – the price of electricity has fallen into negative territory at times, as low as -5 cents per kilowatt-hour. Germany has paid the French, Belgians etc. millions of euros to buy Germany’s surplus electricity so that the German electricity grids do not collapse.
However, this blatant surplus of electricity has not only meant that a lot of electricity has had to be sold abroad for a fee and lines to France and Belgium have had to operate at full capacity, there have also been numerous power outages in south-west Germany in particular, which could be linked to the oversupply and local grid overload.
The real drama is that the numerous solar plants in Germany cannot be controlled, regulated or even taken off the grid when electricity production exceeds demand. If there is a lot of sunshine – possibly accompanied by a lot of wind – on an afternoon with low electricity demand, Germany has increasing problems getting rid of the surplus energy.
This not only increases the potential for regional power outages and so-called “brownouts,” it also greatly increases the cost of electricity production overall – as Easter has shown.
The Siemens disaster
Storing electricity is a fundamental problem that has not been solved. Big companies like Siemens experimented for more than a decade with steam engines transforming electricity produced by windmills into hydrogen, in order to stock and transport it. Those experiments did not result in a viable commercial business model. Meanwhile Siemens, once upon a time in the 1960s a leader in nuclear technology, has abandoned its entire energy branch.
In 2020, the energy division was separated from Siemens. However, Siemens Energy ambitiously wanted to grow in the wind energy business and merged with the Spanish company Gamesa. But just three years later, it was clear that this would not work. Were the reasons additional management mistakes, was it Chinese competition or were there other issues?
Siemens Energy turned from a beacon of hope to a stock market nightmare. New bad news came from quarter to quarter. It was the wind power business, of all things, that slipped deeper and deeper into deficit. The Managing Board of Siemens Energy had to lower its forecasts countless times, and Siemens lost lots of money with its mergers in Spain. If the management had stamina, they would investigate thoroughly the power outage of last Monday and publish the conclusions. What happened in Spain and Portugal could happen at any moment in Germany and Austria.
Twenty-five years ago, I was involved in the municipal council of the village where I lived in Austria until 2020, when I was forced to quit. We had worked on emergency scenarios for a blackout. One item was to organize “islands of infrastructure” in military barracks and other buildings. The plan was that in case of emergency, people would be able to walk there and be provided with food, water, and first aid. In those days, there was still a generation of leaders who were hands-on and who knew how to get things done. Later I realized that this generation of men and women had passed away. In today’s EU, any such crisis would probably lead to a humanitarian disaster, to a total breakdown of public order.
I remember well the blackout that hit Northern Italy in 2003 and another one in the US; both were protracted and citizens were left in the dark and cold. In war-torn Iraq, people were wondering how those Western armies and NGOs would ever build up the electricity after the US invasion since they were unable to do it back home.
Having lived in Lebanon until the summer of 2023, I am fully aware of constant power cuts and know the nuisance of running one’s own generator, the bad smell, and the noise of all the generators around. But diesel can provide a regular flow of electricity, which no solar panel can do. But thanks to affordable Chinese solar panels, nearly every household in Lebanon has one.
Good old diesel generator
Interestingly, hospitals in Spain and Portugal continued to provide services thanks to their diesel generators. Emergency operations could be done and intensive care was secured. But what about the internet and mobile phone providers? The entire system of mobile communication broke down. Even speeches by the heads of governments could be watched abroad but not by concerned citizens.
I sometimes joked with my Lebanese friends that they should do crash courses for EU institutions on how to live without a regular supply of electricity. Using common sense, keeping good relations with one’s neighbors and knowing how to handle a diesel generator are certainly helpful. And where does the diesel come from? Yes, Russian oil companies used to provide huge volumes of diesel to their EU customers. The Rosneft refinery of Schwedt close to Berlin was confiscated by the German authorities in 2022.
The back-up for all those renewable efforts used to be natural gas, mostly from Russia, termed the “energy of transition.” There was a consensus that cooperating on oil and gas within the European continent was of benefit to both sellers and buyers. These days are gone.
What happened on Monday on the Iberian Peninsula was another wake-up call. But so far EU officials seem stuck in their green agenda. They could have understood previous signals, but they refused to do so. In the EU, energy has become an ideological topic and is no longer a technical matter. What Spain and Portugal went through earlier this week lasted for about 10 hours, and I expect more such incidents. One can handle it in a country like Lebanon, but the question remains: can one run an industry with constant power cuts? Deindustrialisation inside the EU will only accelerate. If one day, certain countries would like to buy Russian gas again, the volumes will be much smaller due to more limited industrial production.
