alt Hacker NewsWind power slashed 4.6B euros off electricity bills in Spain last year
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There are multiple comments in this thread suggesting that the outage in Spain was caused by wind power.
This has also been suggested by various politicians and others in front of a microphone or a camera without any basis in fact whatsoever. There is a (by now remote) chance that indeed wind power (or renewables in general) were the primary cause but the evidence points in an entirely different direction, the lack of control authority and undampened oscillations getting out of control. In such a situation various safety protocols dictate that sections of the grid disconnect and go into island mode or switch off altogether. This to prevent damage to the grid and to all of the grid connected devices. As these outages go, I think it was handled extremely well, the main question remaining is what the root cause was and what should be done to avoid a repetition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...
It's fascinating to see the live electricity sources with Electricity Maps.
Here is Spain: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/
Throughout the day you can clearly see how the wind and sun power starts kicking in, when it's raining hydro raises, etc.
That's interesting because here in California, $4.6B is slashed off productivity because of wind.
- still angry at pg&e
The US has become a nation that values persuasion over reality. It values the propaganda over truth.
The US was the envy of Europe with the IRA, which started to establish a huge manufacturing base for solar, batteries, etc., that would power cheap energy for the rest of the century for the US. The EU couldn't pull it together because they have only sticks, whereas the US could use carrots to cause massive investment. And it worked! We were building so many factories, mostly in highly Republican rural areas, because that's where there's a lot of people looking for manufacturing jobs. But the factories that were built, that raised wages for entire communities, they couldn't even say that it was for renewable energy, that it was a benefit of the IRA, because the propaganda is so thick that it would poison the jobs. And now, all that's going away. All the lead. All so that we can steal nasty heavy sour crude from a South American country that US oil producers don't even want.
With the Greenland invasion insanity, Europe is finally getting a small taste of what it's like to be a normal person living in the US the past decade. Fantasy, vibes, and really bad values have taken over the semblance of sanity.
The US is missing out on the biggest technological transition of the century, far bigger than AI, because the masses have been negatively polarized against cheaper energy bills through misinformation.
Without paywall: https://archive.is/lV7Ng
UK energy consumers cry
Related today:
UK secures record supply of offshore wind projects
PG&E bills in California are also going down this year as well.
Meanwhile the administration of the US says that wind farms are "losers": https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/01/09/trump-...
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Did those savings actually trickle to end costumer bills? I often read how renewables are making electricity cheaper but I only pay more and more despite the share of them increasing here in electricity generation.
An interesting thing I learned from reading the article is that Spain is the 4th largest exporter of turbines behind only China, Germany, and Denmark.
Reading the other comments, it's really a shame we can't have a discussion about something happening in the world before it immediately becomes about the US, on topics that are barely relevant.