On June 23, New York’s Governor Hochul announced that she had directed the New York Power Authority to build a new nuclear energy facility with at least 1 GWe of capacity. During the announcement speech, she provided several bits of information leading to an informed prediction that the facility will initially include 4 BWRX-300’s on a site close to Lake Ontario. ///

Didn't New York just shut down a 1GWe (or more?) nuclear power plant near NYC just a couple of years ago in favor or "renewable energy"? So this is an acknowledgement that shutting it down was a mistake and waste of money.

If cases targeting American energy continue to prevail, ‘it could result in shutting down the oil industry.’ //

Senators met yesterday for a subcommittee hearing to discuss claims that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), foreign donors, and leftist legal activism are behind a “systematic campaign” to dismantle American energy dominance.

Throughout the hearing, Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, emphasized how foreign funding and activist litigation are undermining U.S. energy infrastructure, posing a national security threat. His four Democrat colleagues repeatedly dismissed the concerns as a “conspiracy theory,” instead focusing on energy costs and “global warming.”

The “assault by the radical left,” “paid for by the [CCP],” seeks to “seize control of our courts [and] to weaponize litigation against U.S. energy producers,” Cruz said. He noted the assault is “three-pronged,” weaponizing “foreign funding, mass litigation, and judicial indoctrination” against “American energy independence.”

The Iberian blackout was a consequence of grid management, not any power source.

The blackout that took down the Iberian grid serving Spain and Portugal in April was the result of a number of smaller interacting problems, according to an investigation by the Spanish government. The report concludes that several steps meant to address a small instability made matters worse, eventually leading to a self-reinforcing cascade where high voltages caused power plants to drop off the grid, thereby increasing the voltage further. Critically, the report suggests that the Spanish grid operator had an unusually low number of plants on call to stabilize matters, and some of the ones it did have responded poorly. //

It may be tempting to view the cascading failures as a sign of incompetence on the part of the grid operators. But these are the same operators who managed the process of black-starting the grid to normal operations within a matter of hours. There should (and undoubtedly will) be questions about the low number of plants dedicated to grid stabilization, but that can be handled with a simple policy fix. An equally focused correction can likely address any problems at the problematic facility that triggered the whole chain of events.

The real issue is why so much hardware on the grid didn't follow its operating specifications, either disconnecting early or failing to respond properly to the calls for stabilization.

Notably missing in all of this is any mention of renewable power. Spain has a lot of it, and it tends to be used to meet a higher fraction of demand during the spring and fall, when heating and cooling demand is lowest. Opponents of renewable energy were quick to point to the Iberian blackout as evidence of the unreliability of wind and solar (accusations that The New York Times was willing to echo). The investigation indicates that all these accusations were completely without merit.

Most Americans have probably never heard of the European Union’s (EU) recently passed Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). According to the EU, the “aim” of the CSDDD “is to foster sustainable and responsible corporate behaviour in companies’ operations and across their global value chains. The new rules will ensure that companies in scope identify and address adverse human rights and environmental impacts of their actions inside and outside Europe.” //

As my colleagues Justin Haskins and Jack McPherrin note in a recent Heartland Institute Policy Study outlining the CSDDD:

It is not hyperbolic to say the CSDDD is one of the most economically restrictive and nakedly authoritarian laws in the history of western democratic civilization. The directive attempts to globally institutionalize sweeping ESG objectives by mandating practices for large companies doing business in the European Union, regardless of whether those companies are headquartered in the EU. Even worse, the CSDDD forces those companies to impose the same standards on many of the businesses operating within their global supply chains— fundamentally transforming all social and economic activity around the world. It is one of the gravest threats to freedom that Americans face today.

Under the CSDDD, all U.S. businesses, from multinational corporations to small family farms, would have to adhere to the EU’s environmental regulations that prioritize the mass adoption of expensive and unreliable so-called green energy while restricting the production of abundant, affordable, and reliable fossil fuel energy.

In essence, the CSDDD “is a transition plan for climate change mitigation aligned with the 2050 climate neutrality objective of the Paris Agreement as well as intermediate targets under the European Climate Law,” says the EU. //

ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods explained on Fox News’ Special Report recently that the EU’s CSDDD represents a non-tariff trade barrier that Trump is intent on eliminating as his team negotiates with EU officials.

Woods also recommended that Congress draft legislation that deems the EU’s CSDDD irrelevant to U.S. businesses. I highly suspect that Trump would sign such a bill with gusto.

There were more than 2,000 active generation interconnection requests as of April 30, totalling 411,600 MW of capacity, according to grid operator ERCOT. A bill awaiting signature on Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, S.B. 6, looks to filter out unserious large-load projects bloating the queue by imposing a $100,000 fee for interconnection studies.

Wind and solar farms require vast acreage and generate energy intermittently, so they work best as part of a diversified electrical grid that collectively provides power day and night. But as the AI gold rush gathered momentum, a surge of new project proposals has created years-long wait times to connect to the grid, prompting many developers to bypass it and build their own power supply.

Operating alone, a wind or solar farm can’t run a data center. Battery technologies still can’t store such large amounts of energy for the length of time required to provide steady, uninterrupted power for 24 hours per day, as data centers require. Small nuclear reactors have been touted as a means to meet data center demand, but the first new units remain a decade from commercial deployment, while the AI boom is here today.

Now, Draper said, gas companies approach IREN all the time, offering to quickly provide additional power generation.

Gas provides almost half of all power generation capacity in Texas, far more than any other source. But the amount of gas power in Texas has remained flat for 20 years, while wind and solar have grown sharply, according to records from the US Energy Information Administration. Facing a tidal wave of proposed AI projects, state lawmakers have taken steps to try to slow the expansion of renewable energy and position gas as the predominant supply for a new era of demand.

It is received wisdom in pro-nuclear circles that sinister fossil fuel interests are partly if not largely responsible for nuclear's abject failure to live up to its remarkable promise. To examine this premise, we must divide fossil fuel into coal, oil, and gas. There has never been much overlap between coal and oil and, until recently, surprisingly little overlap between oil and gas. //

Jack Devanney
Dec 8, 2022

US nuclear died in the early, mid-1970's. There were only a handful of orders after 1975 and none after 1978 in the 20th century. Given the promethean promise of nuclear, we need to know what caused this demise. Some say it was Big Oil. But Big Oil was making a big investment in nuclear during this period. Gotta be something else. What happened in the last 15 or so years is irrelevant to to the question on the table.

We have been fed two lies about nuclear electricity by the nuclear power establishment.

The Negligible Probability Lie

The probability of a sizable release of radioactive material from a nuclear power plant is so low that we can just assume it won't happen. //

The Intolerable Harm Lie

Any significant release of radioactive material would be so catastrophic that it cannot be allowed to happen. //

Nuclear power emerged at just about the most difficult time possible economically. In the early-mid 1960's, the real cost of oil was at a all time low. The majors were buying oil in the Middle East at about a penny a liter. Oil was so cheap that it was pushing into electricity generation, the long time preserve of coal. This in turn forced the price of coal down, so it too was at an all time low. This was the cutthroat market that a technology that did not exist 15 years earlier, a technology that was just starting down a steep learning curve, had to enter and compete in. Amazingly it did so. Thanks to nuclear's incredible energy density, these fledgling plants were able to produce electricity at 0.37 cents per kWh in 1965. That's less than 3 cents/kWh in 2020 money.

But the cost of nuclear power escalated rapidly. In the boom of the late 60's and early 70's, nuclear lost control of its costs. This was accompanied by regulatory attempts to ensure we would never have a release. These attempts led to ALARA, the principle that any exposure to radiation is unacceptable if the plant can afford to reduce it further. In other words, there are no limits. //

The Intolerable Harm Lie is false. LNT is not a realistic model of radiation harm. The dose response curve is highly non-linear and critically dependent on dose rate. Cell based laboratory experiments, extensive animal testing, and human study after human study detected no statistically reliable harm unless the dose rates are well above the natural background dose rates in the highest background areas. At very low dose rates, LNT is off by orders of magnitude.

Perhaps the most compelling background radiation study was done in Kerala, India. //

For the US nuclear establishment, abandoning the Intolerable Harm Lie would be suicidal. And as long as you are promulgating the Intolerable Harm Lie, you need the Negligible Probability Lie to stay in business.

In 1982 and 1983, recycled rebar, containing Cobalt-60, was “accidentally” used in the construction of 180 apartment buildings in Taipei. Most of the buildings were completed in 1983. The problem was discovered in the mid-1990's, and full scale investigations started in 1996 after a kindergartener whose classroom was in one of the contaminated buildings died of leukemia.

The Chen 2004 Study
The first study was led by W. L. Chen of the National Yang-Ming University. //

In 2006, Hwang et al published a competing study of the Taipei apartment exposure. //

The Taipei apartment data emphatically contradicts LNT. Hwang's methodology in attempting to refute this conclusion suggests that we are dealing with defense lawyers, not scientists.

The Hwang paper was designed to shoot down the Chen paper and reestablish LNT. //

The Hwang numbers may not demolish LNT as dramatically as the Chen figures; but they clearly meet Feynman's criterion for "one ugly fact", although in this case, the fact that a providential Nature has endowed us with a radiation damage repair system which has no problem with dose rate profiles such as Figure 2 is far from ugly. It's humanity's salvation.

Here's a truly ugly fact. The promoters of LNT can't show us one situation, not one, where people have received a very large dose spread more or less evenly over a protracted period where LNT does not screw up completely. It's quite remarkable that a 100 year old theory that is based on an assumption --- radiation damage is unrepairable --- that we now know is flat wrong, and is always orders of magnitude in error on the kind of dose rate profiles that will be incurred in a nuclear power plant release has survived.

EDF is building a nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point in England. EDF proudly requires that each of its plants have a tombstone like Figure 1 at the main entrance, a point it emphasizes in its advertising. EDF is not alone, you will find the phrase "safety is our overriding priority" in various forms repeated over and over again by the NRC, INPO, and the rest of the nuclear establishment. For example, INPO has a monomanical focus on safety culture which it defines as “an organization’s values and behaviors that serve to make nuclear safety the overriding priority.”

Hinkley Point C(HPC) will cost at least $18,000/kW and take over 12 years to construct. //

Table 1 shows the overnight cost in 2024 USD and build times of the six lowest overnight cost plants built in the USA. When I lived in the Florida Keys, I enjoyed some of the cheapest electricity in the country, thanks to Turkey Point 3 and 4.

If you repeat the Figure 2 calculation for Turkey Point 3 at $795 per kW, the LCOE is just under 3 cents/kWh, about 4 times less than Hinkley Point 3. //

Over the 3 year, 2022-2024 period, the EIA finds that Turkey Point 3 had a capacity factor of 95.2%, about 5% above the USA average, and ranking it 15th among 92 reactors, In 53 years of operation, Turkey Point 3 and all its elderly brethren have harmed exactly zero members of the public. Most of these plants will still be operating in 2050. Turkey Point 3 and the other five plants in Table 1 were designed and built before the current regulatory apparat became organized. There was no independent regulator. //

We made a disastrous, tragic, colossal, brobdingnagian blunder. We set up an omnipotent bureaucracy whose overriding priority, as it so clearly states, is nuclear safety. While Congress declared "public health and safety" to be just one one of its goals, it created an apparat for which nuclear health and safety was effectively the only goal. The NRC would be judged on its ability to prevent a release. Period.

Bureaucrats are not saints. They reacted according to the incentives they have been given, just as we would. And since we have given the last word to these souls we have misguided, it is their priorities that rule, not society's. The regulatory structure that the AEA/ERA setup is inherently inconsistent with the stated goals.

The result has been an auto-genocidal increase in the cost of nuclear power for no apparent benefit. There is nothing in the actual harm data that suggests the oldest plants are less safe than the newest. When Three Mile Island 2 melted down in 1979 and produced the biggest release in the US so far, it was the youngest plant in the US fleet, and subject to the most stringent regulation. //

vboring
May 13

Grok estimates that the choice to implement "safety" regulations for nuclear energy in such expensive ways has killed about 840,000 people in the US so far.

Safety first! is a strict lie.

https://x.com/i/grok/share/H38COlrdT1VvfBrjU0rlLv3HE

Or why I hate costly nuclear. //

Poverty has a Lost Life Expectacy(LLE) of the order of tens of billions of years per year. And we reject should-cost nuclear for fear of an occasional release that worst case, Chernobyl, properly handled, will have a public LLE of less than a 1000 years? This makes sense only if we assume a malthusian level of selfishness. But that is precisely where the nuclear establishment is. //

Jack Devanney
May 19
Edited

I rarely compliment the choir, but I do want to give a shout out to the choristers for whom nuclear's main attraction is its low CO2. For them, this was a very tough sermon. It was a call to change focus, metanoeite if you will, from what nuclear can do for the climate to what nuclear can do for the poor, and for all humanity. That's not an easy switch. For one thing, it implies that costly nuclear is not good enough. It's immoral. We must have should-cost nuclear, and that will require a complete rethink about how we regulate nuclear.

I expected something like a 5% subscriber cancellation rate. Instead we lost 7 of 2900. I thought that was impressive.

Here's your reward. If and only if we push nuclear down to its should-cost, not only will nuclear push fossil fuel out of power generation except for a bit of peaking and backup fo r unplanned outages and do so automatically, not only will EV's now be very attractive economically, but now we can talk seriously about synfuels starting with synthetic methane.

If LNT is biological nonsense, how did it ever get accepted? The Hamlet in that tragedy is Ed Lewis.

The Rockefeller Foundation and the Genetic Scare. //

Hundreds of scientists could have pointed out the glaring inconsistency. But as far as I know none did. Moreover, fractionation, dividing a therapeutic dose into fractions, delivered a day or so apart to allow healthy cells to recover, was universal medical practice. If LNT is valid, fractionation makes no sense. Even Lauriston Taylor, a towering figure, who called LNT "a deeply immoral use of our scientific heritage" did not speak out until 1980. He was about 25 years too late. Were all these people grasping creeps?

Of course not. They were petrified of the bomb. If LNT could end bomb testing, then I will have to abandon scientific integrity, just this once. Look at Taylor's strange wording. You don't normally call a model, a "use". He knew LNT had been accepted not because it was correct, but because it was a tool, a tool for controlling the bomb.

https://heartland.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Apr-25-ARC-Scorecard.pdf

Adding together the above numbers yields the following affordable, reliable, and clean total scores, with lower scores being closer to perfect power sources and higher scores being least compatible with the affordable, reliable, and clean ideal:

Natural gas - 3
Nuclear - 6
Hydro -7
Coal - 8
Biomass - 12
Wind - 22
Solar - 23

The Trump administration has canceled $3.7 billion worth of grants for multiple climate-related infrastructure projects, the majority of which were approved in former President Joe Biden's lame duck period after he lost the 2024 election.

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright made the announcement on Friday and said the 24 projects failed to advance the energy needs of the American people, were not economically viable and would not generate a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.

The department said that after a "thorough and individualized financial review of each award," it found that nearly 70% of the awards (16 of the 24 projects) had been signed between election day on Nov. 5 and Biden's last day in office on Jan. 20. //

The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions is claiming a loss of $4.6 billion in economic output, along with the loss of thousands of jobs, and it would be roundly interesting to see them show their work on that estimate. That loss of economic output, of course, requires that there is some profit somewhere along the way. If any of these enterprises were profitable, if any of them actually generated any economic output, they wouldn't require millions or billions in taxpayer subsidies.

There is also a storm of whining about how these cuts and others like them under President Trump "stifle innovation." Horsefeathers. If there is a profit to be made in any of these technologies, someone will go to the effort to develop them.

President Joe Biden, with strong backing from environmental lobbyists and a last-minute defection from West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, pushed through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Bill. These measures allocated billions of dollars in federal credits and loan guarantees to favored industries, all under the banner of environmental protection.

What followed was a Soviet-style industrial strategy in which a handful of Washington bureaucrats determined the winners and losers of America's energy future. //

Biden's green agenda had another critical flaw: financing. Much of it depended on borrowing from China—ironically benefiting Chinese companies dominating the very industries Biden sought to boost. Since the launch of China's "Made in China 2025" initiative, Chinese firms—heavily subsidized by their government—have taken over more than 85% of the global rooftop solar panel market. Battery components for solar installations have even higher Chinese market dominance. In effect, Biden borrowed money from China to finance the growth of Chinese companies that sold solar products to U.S. installers.

The new House bill aims to dismantle this entire framework in one stroke. It eliminates the trading of green credits between corporations, revokes low-interest green loans, and entirely phases out subsidies for renewable energy initiatives.

To those who claim this approach is irresponsible, we pose a simple question: How many more decades should the green energy sector rely on government aid to stay afloat? Sustainable energy and transition projects are essential, but they must prove their viability in the open market—just like oil and gas companies do every day. This is classic Adam Smith-style capitalism: let competition and innovation—not government favoritism—determine success.

Trump also supports nuclear power, one of the cleanest and most efficient methods of generating electricity. //

By issuing appropriate permitting waivers, Trump aims to unlock this potential, even if a modest federal investment is necessary to overcome ideological resistance from the Left.

‘You can’t reuse turbines, and there are now thousands upon thousands of blades just sitting there in warehouses already … It’s an environmental disaster.’ //

While green advocates commonly use the terms renewable, sustainable, and net zero to describe their efforts, the dirty little secret is that much of the waste from solar panels and wind turbines is ending up in landfills.

The current amounts of fiberglass, resins, aluminum and other chemicals — not to mention propeller blades from giant wind turbines — pose no threat currently to local town dumps, but this largely ignored problem will become more of a challenge in the years ahead as the 500 million solar panels and the 73,000 wind turbines now operating in the U.S. are decommissioned and replaced.

Greens insist that reductions in carbon emissions will more than compensate for increased levels of potentially toxic garbage; others fret that renewable energy advocates have not been forthright about their lack of eco-friendly plans and the technology to handle the waste. //

“Globally, we produced 20-25 million tons of solar panels in 2023. They will come offline in roughly 20 years. That is 20-25 million tons of solar waste a year in 2045.”

The International Renewable Energy Agency puts the potential mountain even higher, pointing to studies that put the 2050 figure at 78 million metric tons.

For now, 90 percent of this detritus goes to landfills. And the panel fields and towering turbines must be dismantled, trucked away, usually by diesel-powered vehicles, and then sent to landfills or ports, where they are shipped to poor, developing countries. Fossil fuels may foul the air, but renewables may pollute the ground. //

In many cases, when highly regulated power companies look to build a new plant, laws require them to set aside money in bonds or escrow accounts to cover or defray decommissioning costs, Mills said. That is not always the case. A recently decommissioned coal mine in northern Louisiana may cost $300 million to break down, according to the Alliance for Affordable Energy, which says those costs will probably be borne by ratepayers. But Isaac and Mills believe financial decommissions requirements have been either ignored or insufficiently funded in the renewable market. ///

Compare the millions of tons of renewable waste that is not renewable and the thousands of tons of nuclear waste that is mostly reusable: nuclear waste is easily manageable and won't be scattered all over the landscape.

To use the heating BTU calculator, you will first need to measure the place you want to heat up. You need to know if you’re heating up a 1000 sq ft, 1500 sq ft, or a 3000 sq ft home, or a 400 sq ft room, for example.

Secondly, you need to figure out what climate zone you live in. That will determine how many BTU per square foot you need for heating (more on that later on). The United States is divided into 7 main climate zones or regions. Example: Miami, Florida, is in Climate Zone 2 and requires 35 BTU of heat per sq ft. Chicago, Illinois, is in Climate Zone 5 and requires 50 BTUs of heat per square foot.

https://basc.pnnl.gov/images/iecc-climate-zone-map

Climate Zone BTUs Per Sq Ft
Climate Zone 1 30 BTU per sq ft
Climate Zone 2 35 BTU per sq ft
Climate Zone 3 40 BTU per sq ft
Climate Zone 4 45 BTU per sq ft
Climate Zone 5 50 BTU per sq ft
Climate Zone 6 55 BTU per sq ft
Climate Zone 7 60 BTU per sq ft

We presuppose the standard ceiling height of 8 ft. For every additional ft above 8 ft, you need to add 12.5%. So, for 9 ft ceiling, you need to multiply the BTUs by 1.125 to get the most adequate estimation.

chart covering all 48 propane tank sizes with average dimensions and tare weights

The mainstream economic narrative in the USA would have us believe that power blackouts are always a bad thing – just think of all that lost productivity! Think of the effect on the GDP!

So I was curious to see this video about the recent blackouts in Spain rack up millions of views on Instagram 👇

I think it resonated with people because it points towards a new narrative for society and the economy – one where joy & connection are prioritized over economic productivity. //

That's one of the things about living in Alaska that we all put up with, and most of us are willing to do so because, well, we live in Alaska. But we don't like it. It doesn't help us bond with our neighbors. There's no joy in a 12-hour blackout. No, we just hunker down, fire up our generators, light some candles, and stoke up our wood stoves to stay warm.

In other parts of the country, though, most people don't have generators or battery backups. These folks are just blacked out, and I can guarantee you that they see no "joy" in it.

Virtually every prescription from the climate-scold left involves us giving up something. They want us to give up our rural homes, they want us to give up our pickups and SUVs, they want us to give up our reliable natural gas and nuclear power plants for unreliable and low-density solar and wind power. They want us, in short, to surrender our prosperity, our modern technological lifestyle, all to prevent some fraction of one percent of a degree of warming over the next century. And now they admonish us to find joy in this? That's going to sell about as well as Kamala Harris's "campaign of joy." //

PubliusCryptus
3 hours ago

I think it resonated with people because it points towards a new narrative for society and the economy – one where joy & connection are prioritized over economic productivity.
Joy and connection? I see hunger and privation. //

Quizzical
3 hours ago
Whenever the power goes out for very many people, someone dies. Literally. Some people in relatively poor health are literally dependent upon electricity to keep powering the machines that keep them alive. Literally killing people is not something to be glossed over as no big deal. //

Peter Mohan
2 hours ago
As a retired NYC Firefighter I personally witness the joy of the 1977 blackout. Four deaths, hundreds injured, thousands arrested and 1600 buildings destroyed or looted.
Many of the businesses never returned to the poor neighborhoods that they had served. I’m looking forward to a heart attack so I can meet the dedicated doctors and nurses in the nearby emergency room.

This is truly bananas: all of Europe appears to have been seconds away a continent-wide blackout.

The grid frequency across continental Europe plunged to 49.85 hertz — just a hair above the red-line collapse threshold.

The normal operating frequency for Europe’s power grid is 50.00 Hz, kept with an extremely tight margin of ±0.1 Hz. Anything outside ±0.2 Hz triggers major emergency actions.

If the frequency had fallen just another 0.3 Hz — below 49.5 Hz — Europe could have suffered a system-wide cascading blackout.

At that threshold, automatic protective relays disconnect major power plants, and collapse accelerates.

And it's disturbingly easy to imagine multiple scenarios where that could have occurred...

SPAIN BLACKOUTS: AN ANONYMOUS EXPERT VIEW

From a deep groupchat, last night, translated from Spanish, written by an expert in transmission and distribution of power. Not my words.

"What has happened on April 28 has a well-located origin: the Aragón-Catalonia corridor, which is one of the most important electric highways in Spain. There is not only the electricity produced by our solar and wind farms in the northeast, but also the electricity that we import from France. This international interconnection, although weak (it can only contribute 3% of our demand, well below the minimum of 10% that marks the EU), in times of stress is essential to balance the network.

At 12:32 p.m., in that Aragón-Catalonia corridor there was an electric shock. What exactly does "shake" mean? It means that suddenly and abnormally, the power that flowed through those lines began to vary violently, rising and falling in a very short time. Such abrupt variability can be due to three main causes:

1. That a relay or transformer on that electric highway detects an abnormal flow of current or voltage (higher or lower than expected) and automatically disconnected to avoid burning or destroyed. This is called that "opens" a relay or switch: it jumps and cuts the passage of electricity to protect itself.

2. That the enormous concentration of renewable energy in that area (mainly solar and wind) has created an electrical resonance: electronic inverters, which synchronize current, can sometimes be amplified between them if a small voltage alteration (for example, due to clouds, strong wind or a slight failure) extends like an echo to all devices, causing widespread oscillations.

3. That a wrong control order has been sent (by mistake or attack) from the SCADA systems, disconnecting or reducing the generation of multiple hit plants. There is no confirmation of this possibility yet, but it is being investigated.

What is known is that as a consequence of that shake, the interconnection with France jumped: we were isolated just at the worst time, when the peninsula needed external support to stabilize.

Without that French help, the frequency of the peninsular network (which should always be 50 Hz exact) began to drop quickly. The frequency is like the heartbeat of the network: if it falls too much, the systems understand that the patient (the network) is collapsing and automatically disconnected so as not to self-destruct. Thus, in just five seconds, the solar and wind farms were turned off —very sensitive to frequency variations—, 15 GW of power was lost suddenly (60% of all the electricity generated at that time), and the network could not take it anymore: it was It collapsed completely, showing the Redeia Platform (REE) a "0 MW" nationwide. That does not mean that all the turbines were physically turned off, but there was no generator synchronized at the common frequency of 50 Hz. It was, for practical purposes, a country off.

To ignite a completely dead network again, one essential thing is needed: plants that can start in black, that is, without receiving energy from anywhere else. Spain has identified five large hydroelectric jumps capable of doing this. However, and here is one of the great negligences that are coming to light, three of those five groups were stopped in scheduled maintenance, by business decision supervised by the administration. Only two were operational. That made the recovery much slower and weaker than it should be in a normal contingency plan.