CLIMATEWIRE | As the lights remained out in Spain and Portugal on Monday, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright appeared on television, attributing the extensive power failure to the reliance on renewable energy sources.

“It’s quite disheartening witnessing the situation in Portugal and Spain and the impact on so many people there. However, depending on the weather for energy is inherently risky,” Wright commented during his CNBC interview.

His statement subtly criticized wind and solar power, which, at the time of the blackout, fueled nearly three-quarters of Spain’s electricity. This perspective was notably different from that of the CEO of the Spanish grid operator, who indicated that it was too early to draw any “definitive conclusions” about the cause of the outage.

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Wright, who previously led an oil field services company, has consistently described wind and solar as expensive and unreliable energy sources that compromise grid stability.

Experts in grid management suggested that renewable energy might have been a factor in the blackout affecting tens of millions, but they warned against premature conclusions. They pointed out that a combination of systemic issues likely contributed to the simultaneous blackouts in both countries within seconds on Monday.

“This appears to be a highly complex incident,” observed Eamonn Lannoye, the European managing director at the Electric Power Research Institute. “It’s not straightforward.”

In recent years, grid failures have increasingly become a subject of political contention, stirring debates on the viability of intermittent energy sources like wind and solar.

In 2021, Texas Governor Greg Abbott quickly blamed renewables for the rolling blackouts during a severe winter storm that left 4.5 million Texans without power. Later investigations by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission found that Texas’ power infrastructure was inadequately prepared for such cold conditions, largely faulting the state’s natural gas facilities, which experienced extensive freeze-ups during the storm.

“I recognize this pattern: initially, renewables get the blame. Then, months later, the full story emerges,” stated Michael Webber, a University of Texas at Austin professor who specializes in the power industry.

Wright has frequently criticized renewable energy during his tenure.

In his initial address to Energy Department staff, he linked rising power costs in Europe to the increased adoption of solar and wind energy. A month later, at a conference in Houston, he stated that regions with higher rates of wind and solar generation experienced corresponding increases in power prices.

On Monday, speaking from Poland where he was announcing a deal to assist in building the country’s first nuclear power plant, Wright was questioned by CNBC’s Brian Sullivan whether the blackout in Spain and Portugal signaled a need for a more diversified energy strategy. Wright didn’t directly mention wind and solar in his reply but commented that Europe’s share of the global GDP was declining due to “expensive, unreliable energy.”

“It’s a choice, but a poor one,” he asserted.

Andrea Woods, a DOE spokesperson, clarified that Wright was answering a question about the necessity for energy diversification. “He was not assessing the cause of the blackout,” she stated.

Experts acknowledge that managing a power grid with increasing shares of renewable resources presents challenges. Grid operators must maintain a constant balance between supply and demand to preserve the system’s electrical frequency and inertia. This task is simpler with traditional energy sources such as coal, gas, and nuclear, which rely on large spinning turbines, explained Pratheeksha Ramdas, an analyst at Rystad Energy.

While wind and solar installations can be equipped with such turbines to provide these services, few currently do. Batteries can help stabilize frequency, but their use in Spain and Portugal is still limited.

“It is too soon to draw definitive lessons as the full investigation is still underway. Nonetheless, this incident underscores some broad challenges, particularly the need for quick and flexible support systems to avert cascading failures,” Ramdas noted in an email.

The blackouts in Spain and Portugal started just after 12:30 p.m. on Monday, following a major generation failure in southwestern Spain, according to Eduardo Prieto, CEO of Red Eléctrica, the Spanish grid operator.

The system initially responded to the outage but was struck by another generation failure 1.5 seconds later, causing disruptions in power flows between Spain and France and leading to the widespread disconnection of renewable resources across the grid. Within five seconds, the system’s voltage dropped to zero.

At a press briefing on Tuesday, when asked if renewables played a role in the outage, Prieto stated it was “premature to make any statements,” but he noted that the grid operator was investigating a major generation failure in the southwest.

“Considering the southwest region I mentioned, it’s quite possible the affected generation could involve solar, but without complete information, we cannot conclusively determine anything,” he added.

Webber, the professor from Texas, expressed confusion over how a sudden loss of power generation, especially from a solar facility, could trigger such a broad outage. Electric grids are designed to withstand sudden losses from large power plants. Normally, these standards are crafted to handle a large nuclear power plant going offline, which would significantly disrupt the grid’s frequency and inertia.

“The idea that one solar farm going offline could cause such extensive issues seems dubious to me,” remarked Webber, who has previously worked for a major French utility. “There’s something else at play here that I can’t quite pinpoint.”

Lannoye from EPRI shared similar sentiments. A more plausible explanation might be that the control systems linking power plants to the grid failed at multiple facilities. This was the scenario in 2019 when a lightning strike affected an offshore wind farm and a natural gas plant in the United Kingdom. The control systems at these plants malfunctioned, triggering a sequence of events that led to a power outage affecting 1 million people.

However, without more information, it’s difficult to ascertain why these systems might have failed in the case of Spain and Portugal, or if such controls were even involved, he noted.

“It’s too early to make judgements, and certainly, this incident won’t determine the fate of any particular technology,” Lannoye concluded. “If past blackouts had determined the viability of technologies, we would no longer be using gas, coal, or nuclear. We’d have no alternatives left.”

This story also appears in Energywire.

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.