Portugal’s prime minister, Luís Montenegro, this week announced that a new ‘independent technical commission’ will assess the energy systems affected by Europe’s biggest blackout, although not until the beginning of the next parliamentary term.
He said on Tuesday that the government was “very committed to drawing all the conclusions about the causes and the responses.” But why the long wait?
Even the most leftwing establishment publications have had to accept the role of an over-reliance on renewables as part of the fanatical drive to “‘net zero,” not least given the early ruling out—including by the European Commission—of “any kind of sabotage or cyberattack.” Extreme weather conditions are also known not to be behind the outages.
Spain and Portugal, two EU leaders in renewables, were sourcing around 80% of their electricity from solar and wind on Monday when the blackouts took place. Importantly, then, former British grid operator Duncan Burt told The Daily Telegraph:
If you have got a very high solar day then your grid is less stable, unless you’ve taken actions to mitigate that. So you would expect things to be less stable than normal.
European leaders and media outlets are, however, skirting around issues surrounding their commitment to net zero and—regardless of Ursula von der Leyen’s claim the EU will learn “lessons” from the events—are unlikely to change tack. Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s insistence that “all the necessary measures will be taken to ensure that this does not happen again” is particularly hard to believe.
Radio presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer noted that officials would talk about nothing else if the outage had been caused by climate change.
As it’s likely the blackouts may have been caused by an over-reliance on unstable renewable energy, it’s barely getting a mention.
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
