Spain did the meme. They actually did the South Park meme. Well... at least they went 80% of the way there. I suspect we're just one or two revelations into the Great Iberian Blackout before they go full "Mystery of the Urinal Deuce."
In the tenth season classic episode, every effort to explain various mysteries, like who did 9/11, with some convoluted conspiracy theory, always boils down to the same answer: "...and it's Muslims."
And so it went with the mystery of the Great Iberian Blackout (Plus Bits of France).
All that the authorities were willing to commit to when the blackout first struck was that they believed it was not due to a cyberattack. My first instinct was to immediately wonder if it was cyberattackers who were to blame, just because some Euroauthority said it wasn't.
But on quick reconsideration, a cyberattack didn't make much sense, even if some Euroauthority said so. If Russia or China had developed some new cyber-weapon that could take out a couple of countries at a time, they wouldn't waste it on Spain and Portugal — certainly not during relative peace. Some tools you keep secret until you need them, and you certainly don't waste them on second- or third-tier rivals.
If China can switch off our lights, we likely won't find out about it until their navy is storming Taiwan's beaches and we're sitting in the dark with our canned goods.
But I digress.
Another popular theory — a massive solar flare like the one that knocked out telegraphs in 1859 — has already been ruled out. "No significant jumps in the proton flux were reported in the last week, and readings remained far below the 10 MeV warning threshold that characterises a minor solar storm," The Journal reported today.
Another theory — that I'm oversimplifying possibly to the point of getting it wrong — held that a surge of solar power hit faster than gas generators could wind down to avoid a grid-shattering overload.
A sudden drop in power was the theory floated by Michael Shellenberger after he looked at what was happening in the power lines.
"All of Europe appears to have been seconds away [from] a continent-wide blackout," Shellenberger wrote. He explained further that "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 point, Europe probably would be blaming the Muslims. Or the Russians. Or the Chinese. They'd be blaming anybody but the people who refused to upgrade Spain's grid to accommodate the greater variability inherent in wind and solar power, which combined accounted for 80% of Spain's power output before the entire peninsula went dark.
This Guardian article by environmental reporter Helena Horton got this close to blaming renewables while also using some serious handwavium to lead the paper's largely left-wing audience away from that conclusion. “The nature and scale of the outage makes it unlikely that the volume of renewables was the cause," a senior European power analyst told the paper, "with the Spanish network more often than not subject to very high volumes of such production.”
But the very next sentence quotes the Spanish grid operator saying that it was "very possible" that one cause was a sudden loss of solar power, just like the one Shellenberger discussed above.
Very possible, eh? You're 80% of the way to doing the South Park meme — take it all the way.
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