By H. Sterling Burnett.
The countrywide power outage Spain and Portugal experienced this week, which also shut down parts of France, is a powerful lesson in the dangers of relying on renewable power, in this case, especially solar, for grid-scale electric provision.
We in the United States have had previews of this over the past decade, with regular outages being experienced each summer in California, America’s leader in government mandated wind and solar use, and in my home state of Texas, where a winter outage – not peak power season in Texas by the way – killed more than 200 people. The primary reason for the Texas power failure was the huge, rapid drop-off in politically favored wind and solar power delivered to the grid.
Spain and Portugal, even more than the rest of Europe, went all in on renewable energy, closing reliable traditional power plants and replacing them with industrial wind and solar facilities in the vain quest to control the climate. According to EuroWeekly, “[o]n April 16, 2025, Spain celebrated a green energy triumph. In a historic achievement, Spain’s national grid was powered entirely by renewable energy on Tuesday, April 16 – the first time this has ever happened on a weekday.”
Spain also bragged about going 100 percent renewable on April 22 and April 28, minutes before the systemwide, multi-country power failure. Then, as EuroWeekly reported, “Just twelve days later, the lights went out across the entire country.”
The energy systems’ respective regulatory authorities quickly ruled out cyber terrorism. Portugal’s regulator quickly posited that the outage was a result of a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” creating instability along the power lines.
Related: Spain, Portugal Plunged Into Darkness Amid Widespread Blackouts—What's the Cause?
The regulators, utility officials, and politicians knew or should have known that their forced insertion of massive amounts of intermittent solar and wind power onto the system was to blame.
“The underlying physics had been understood for years, and the specific vulnerabilities had been spelled out repeatedly in technical warnings that policymakers ignored,” wrote U.S. energy analyst Michael Shellenberger in a post on the event. “In 2017, ENTSO-E, the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity, published a major report [that] concluded that the risk of cascading failures across Europe would increase unless governments invested heavily in synthetic inertia, large-scale storage, and smarter real-time grid management.
“In 2022, a team of researchers modeled the Spanish grid with large use of wind and solar and warned that, without significant investments in flexibility and inertia-providing technologies, the grid’s stability would be at risk,” Shellenberger continued.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright gets it. In an April 28 appearance on CNBC, he said, “It’s very sad to see what’s happened to Portugal and Spain and so many people there. But you know, when you hitch your wagon to the weather, it’s just a risky endeavor.”
It was worse than risky—it was deadly. People died as a result of the power failure.
The problems with solar power are beginning to dawn on legislators in some states. One bill being considered in Texas would impose a uniform reliability or firming requirement for all generators. The bill would also require renewable power sources to pay for their volatility.
Louisiana is also simultaneously playing catch-up while looking ahead. Louisiana state Rep. Brett Geymann (R-Lake Charles), chairman of the House Natural Resources and Environment committee, has introduced a bill that would greatly reduce the harm posed by future industrial solar facilities. Among other things, the bill provides provisions to protect wildlife and farmland, to prevent visual impairment or nuisance, and to ensure that solar facilities are responsible cradle-to-grave for the disposal of their waste. Neither parishes nor the state should be responsible for disposing of piles of toxin-filled solar panels.
To be clear, in my opinion, industrial solar power is a danger to the environment, the power grid, ratepayers, and taxpayers, and accordingly has no place in a modern power system. Proponents of renewable energy tout it as part of a multi-layered energy strategy – “all of the above” position. I reject this in favor of all that is affordable, reliable, and clean.
The Heartland Institute recently published two reports, “Affordable, Reliable, and Clean: An Objective Scorecard to Assess Competing Energy Sources,” and “How States Can Push Back Against the Destructive Expansion of Industrial Solar Power.” These reports show that solar power fails on all three of those metrics, being the most expensive and tied for the least reliable source of electric power generation, and, on an all things considered environmental basis, solar power is not even clean.
On a Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity basis, accounting for subsidies and the costs of other power sources needed to backup, supplement, and regulate solar power, it is the most expensive source of electric power – 10 times more expensive than natural gas on a megawatt per hour basis, and greater than four times more expensive than coal.
Aside from cost and reliability concerns, industrial solar facilities destroy both wildlife habitat and productive farmland. Habitat conversion is the biggest killer of wildlife and industrial solar requires approximately 60 square miles of solar panels to produce the same amount of power as a conventional power plant, even after mining and transmission are accounted for.
As if that is not enough, industrial solar facilities create huge end-of-life waste problems, are dependent upon child and slave labor, and as the market is currently configured, put the United States at the mercy of China for critical minerals, metal, components, and finished products.
Is it really a good idea for the United States to become beholden to China for its energy security when we have a secure, abundant supply of fossil fuels and uranium?
In short, expanding industrial solar power anywhere in the United States serves no useful purpose. Adding more industrial solar to the grid threatens to make large, multi-state power outages, like those recently seen in Spain and Portugal, foreseeable and common. In his song, “War,” Edwin Starr once sang, “War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, say it again!” The same could be sung from the rooftops about industrial solar, “Solar, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, say it again!”
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., ([email protected]) is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit research organization based in Arlington Heights, Illinois.
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