4-29-25 - 7am - Why The Blackout In Spain Isn't A Bigger Story

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
To Houston, EXAs two years ago when they relighte on
wind power.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
I'm not quite sure that she left knew exactly what
she was doing when she was leaving that talk about
but I can.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
Only am and was the first word Texas.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Yeah, the Houston, Texas or the Houston blackout that happened
a few years back.

Speaker 3 (00:22):
Give it.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
That was a big snowstorm that did it crippled almost everything. Yeah,
and not not just the wind and solar power that they.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Had over there.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
I forget the name of their grid operator in Texas,
but they er cod or something. Anyway, they assure they
got it all fixed.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
I go want to jump back really quickly to the
headlines and the stories that I've tried to search out
for the cause of this apparent blackout in Spain. The
big wigs that we had seen that I had read
the CNNs and the Reuters and the Times. They have
no clue to what the cause of the power outage

(01:02):
would be. Oddly enough, there are some smaller magazines, some
EDBDU websites out there. I just say that they're smaller
and ABD because I don't know these names. I don't
recognize these names. But from Renewable Economy. Their headline is
Spain reached one hundred percent renewables a week before blackout,
so somebody there is making the connection. And then there's

(01:23):
Sustainability Magazine. Again I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:26):
Each you know, I've lost my subscription renew that.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Their headline is did renewable energy cause Spain and Portugal's
power outage?

Speaker 3 (01:36):
At least they asked the questions, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
These two and I'm just I don't know how big
they are, but these two smaller. They are smaller than
CNN Reuters in the Times. And we don't know what
you're asking the questions.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Right, and we don't know what their bias or angle
is either correct, you know, So we don't know whether they're.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
Again with the website labeled Renewable Economy or Sustainable Ability Magazine.
I think they would probably lean a little bit more towards.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
You would think they would, but it could be it
could be just the.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Or the or it could actually be that they lean
toward it, but they're being objective.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
Imagine that she's weird. That would be really weird.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
So this is this, This is one of the largest
peacetime blackouts that Europe has ever seen. And as I'm
trying to point out here, it's not random, and it
was not unforseeable, and in fact, it was exactly as
I said in the last hour what I've been warning
for years that this is not that not only are

(02:43):
these renewables not reliable, but when they fail, there's going
to be social chaos. And and I'll get back to
the social chaos in a minute, but I want to,
I really want you to focus on these.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
Renewables and how For.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
Example, Dragon and I were talking in the break about
do you think that Jared Polus yesterday or this morning
wakes up and thinks to himself or Mike Johnston, who's
pushing you know, for an all electrified Denver, Colorado, that
they wake up and they think to themselves, maybe this
isn't such a good idea after all.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
Do you think that the C suite at Excel Energy.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
Is sitting up in Minnesota or wherever it is that
they're based, and that they are thinking to themselves, maybe
we ought to rethink what we're doing in Colorado. Maybe
we all quit shutting down the coal fired plants. Maybe
we ought to spin back up one of the nuclear plants.
Maybe maybe we ought to do something differently, but no,

(03:56):
which gets to the point about think ball wanning, particularly
the domestic cabal you know, the CNN, US or ABC
News or whoever it might be, ONTs to bury this.
Remember I told you last night when that works. This
was not the lead that this should have been the
lead story other than perhaps you know, Trump's hundred days
in office, which was the second story, and his poll

(04:20):
numbers after the first story, which was ironically the weather.

Speaker 3 (04:28):
The five minutes before.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
The blackout at twelve thirty local time, Spain's electric grid
was running under highly unusual and dangerous conditions.

Speaker 3 (04:46):
Sold photo will.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
Take solar, thermal win power together, as I pointed out yesterday,
was supplying about seventy eight almost eighty percent of all generation.
Nuclear was at a level more than a half percent.
Cold generation, which is mostly industrial waste heat plants, was
another five percent or something. The gas fired plants, other

(05:12):
than the nuclear, I would say is the most reliable,
was only contributing about three percent, less than one gigawa
across the entire grid. This means this translates into that
there was almost no dispatchable spinning generation online, no heavy turbines,

(05:32):
no stabilizing momentum, almost no inertia, which is the physical
property that resists sudden changes in motion and objects in
motion stays in motion. You know that that is what
has stabilized our electrical grids for hundreds of years now,

(05:53):
well for more than one hundred years now. It's that spinning.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
Again.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
Go back and think about the solar farm out at
da at Denver International. What do you see when you
go out there. Do you see any turbines, Do you
see anything spinning? No, it's just converting that sunlight right
there at those panels into electricity, which you know is

(06:24):
obviously being lost, you know, as it's being fed down
transmission lines, feeder lines into the transmission lines to finally
get to where you know, whatever that's serving at the airport.
So go back to Europe, go back to Spain and Portugal.
If almost eighty percent is non spinning generation, that meant

(06:51):
that almost no dispatchable which means turn it on. No
spinning generation was online, No heavy turbines, no stabilizing momentum,
no inertias, I said, which is what keeps it going.
So then when that disturbance hit in the afternoon, there
was nothing on the grid, nothing in the system, to

(07:13):
resist it, to oppose it, to counter it. The grid's
frequency essentially, that's the heartbeat of the system that just plunged.
And then that didn't affect just Spain. The grid frequency
drops were registered across the entire continent. So while this

(07:33):
is being reported as a Spanish and Portuguese blackout, it
actually shook the entire European grid. I'm not very good
at physics, but there's some basic physics that I understand,

(07:54):
and that underlying physics has been understood for years, and
the vulnerabilities had been spelled out repeatedly in technical warnings
that policy makers continue to ignore, both in Europe where
they've gone full bore and in this country where they're
trying to go full bore. For more than one hundred

(08:18):
years now, electric grids were built around those heavy spinning
machines like the coal plants, the turbines, the nuclear reactors
and those massive.

Speaker 3 (08:30):
Machines.

Speaker 1 (08:32):
And you know, maybe I should explain why I understand this.
I understand this because early in my legal career, as
as the chairman of the Ilkloming Municipal Power Authority, one
of the things that we did was we bought in
and constructed some hydro electric power in Oklahoma, and part

(08:54):
of my job was to negotiate the I obviously didn't
negotiate that this, but we negotiated the purchase of turbines,
turbines that were manufactured in Brazil and Argentina because they
were very good at doing these, particularly hydro electric turbines,

(09:14):
and so I had to learn all the dynamics of
how this stuff works because in negotiating those contracts, of course,
I obviously had engineers with me, which was made for
a fun time lawyers and engineers together.

Speaker 3 (09:30):
It's it's.

Speaker 1 (09:32):
Basic phizzies that these machines spin massive metal chefs at
thousands of revolutions per minute, and that's what creates the electricity.
But at the same time, it provides inertia and that
smooths out any shops that occur on the grid, and

(09:53):
that always gives the grid operators time to respond to faults.
It's free, it's automatic, and it's built into the system.
And then we decide that oh no, no, because we're
using you know, we're using uranium. Oh my gosh, we
can't do that, because we'll have another Chernobyl, We'll have
another three mile island and it's the cleanest energy of

(10:16):
all or we're using polon natural gas. Oh my gosh,
we can't do that. We've got to do something new
again about control. So you start to see this rise
of solar wind, which starts changing all of the dynamics
of how the grid really operates. Solar panels do not
spin anything. Wind turbines, while they do spin, are usually

(10:41):
decoupled from the grid, so they don't provide direct mechanical
inertia to the grid itself. So when you see the
turbine spinning on the eastern planes, that power, that electricity
is decoupled. That spinning itself is decoupled.

Speaker 3 (10:58):
From the grid.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
So when they stop spinning, which they often are not spinning,
there's no effect on the grid. But when they are spinning,
they decouple it from the grid, so that if there's
you know, if suddenly all of the I forget how
much oil is in one of those turbines, but if
all that oil starts to leave and there's a fire

(11:23):
and it starts to stop spinning, it's not going to
have this oscillating effect on the grid. So they decouple
it from the grid to prevent that, which means no
spinning no electricity. Both rely on what are called inverters.
Those are just basic electronics that convert DC from the

(11:45):
source the panel or the turbine, the wind turbine, into AC.
The inverters are fast, they're very efficient, they're very precise,
but they have no mass, they have no stored momentum,
they have no inertia, and therefore there's no stability in
the in the inverters to stabilize the system when it wobbles.
Inverters follow the grid's frequency, but they don't resist any

(12:09):
changes in the frequency. So when countries start replacing the
heavy spinning plants with these lightweight, you know, almost electronic
like inverter based generation, the grid became faster and lighter.
But when it becomes faster and lighter, which I don't
know why people think that's an advantage, because it really

(12:31):
is a disadvantage because when it becomes faster and lighter,
it becomes far more sensitive to a disruption. Now, that's
been known since, that's been known publicly since at least
twenty seventeen, and why. In twenty seventeen, the European Network

(12:51):
of Transmission System Operators and so E, they published a
major report warning that rising levels of invert based generation
would cause frequency deviations would grow larger and faster after
these disturbances, and they conclude that the risk of a
cascading failure so as the frequencies change and there's no

(13:14):
inertia behind the disruption to keep the frequency moving, that's
going to create a cascade of failures across the entire grid.
And in particular they were talking about the European grid
and that those risks of failure would increase unless those

(13:35):
governments that were investing so heavily in these renewables would
start investing heavily in synthetic inertia, large scale storage which
we really don't have the technology for, and smarter real
time grid management which we don't have and we started
to allow in this country. So go back just to

(13:57):
what three years ago, searchers modeled the Spanish grid with
large use of wind and solar, and they came out
from that modeling with a warning that if there was
not significant investments in flexibility and inertia providing technologies, the
stability of the grid in Europe was going to be
at risk. And they showed that as Europe continued to

(14:22):
phase out coal nuclear and combined cycle plants, curtailment of
wind and solar will rise dramatically, and then grid inertia
would fall. And when the grid inertia would fall, that
increased the likelihood of frequency instability, and that instability would
want result in blackouts, brownouts, and probably at some point

(14:48):
bad enough, a complete collapse of the grid. So they
concluded that if you want to make to maintain reliability
along with decarbonization, I'm just saying what they reported because
I say the decarbonization is a fool's errand but they didn't.

(15:09):
But they said, if you're going to do that, then
you've got to build substantial news sources of some sort
of synthetic inertia, backup generation and grid flexibility. In other words,
you've got to have a baseline, stable, reliable source of
power of inertia, because inertia is really the key here.

(15:29):
You've got to have a stable source of inertia, which
you're only going to get from cold natural gas, nuclear
at least in today's technologies. Now, other risks, other countries.
We're seeing those risks play out in real time. I

(15:51):
had to dig but South Australia September twenty sixteen, there
was a nation of high renewable penetration and then they
had a major storm that led to a grid collapse,
and the investigators trying to figure out why the grid

(16:11):
collapse concluded that it was the lack of inertia as
the key reason the system could not recover. So for
everybody out there who intuitively understands that we cannot rely,
I know, we want to think about reliability of solar
and wind being that we're going to have cloudy days

(16:35):
and we're going to have still calm days without wind,
and we want to think about that as being the problem.

Speaker 3 (16:42):
And it is.

Speaker 1 (16:43):
Don't get me wrong, that is a problem because when
solar panels don't have any you know, radiation to convert
to electricity, and when the wind turbines don't have any
wind speed to spend the turbines, you don't have any
electricity produced. So this is why I say I'm not
opposed to wind and solar, but I am opposed to

(17:06):
this idea that we can go one hundred percent wind
and solar because there is and this is what I
want you to learn, there is no inertia. There is
no spinning machines that will continue to spin and there's
nothing out there. You want to decarbonize Colorado, so you

(17:30):
want to take away all the inertia.

Speaker 3 (17:33):
So when we have when was it was it?

Speaker 1 (17:37):
It must have been last week. It was Thursday or Friday.
We had one of those really cool, cloudy days. We're
dak and I were joking about this is a nap
day to go home and crawl back in bed and
take a nap because it was gray overcast. Well, there
would be no inertia to keep anything spinning to generate electricity.
The same thing happened in Germany in twenty seventeen. Britain

(17:57):
had one in twenty nineteen.

Speaker 3 (17:59):
So this is new. It's just that now for I
don't know why.

Speaker 1 (18:05):
But now people are beginning to realize, oh, we got
a problem here.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
Engineers and lawyers.

Speaker 1 (18:10):
Ain't that a thing?

Speaker 4 (18:12):
My husband's an engineer and I just finished my master's.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
Of legal studies.

Speaker 4 (18:16):
Yeah, fun times at our house.

Speaker 1 (18:22):
So before I go back to some of the specifics
about why this is so important, let's talk about the
cabal for a moment, and let's think about why this
isn't a bigger story. Then I think it should be.
I think this should be a huge story. But the

(18:43):
cabal doesn't want you to understand what's going on because
well it would cause you just start questioning what we're
trying to accomplish in this country. So during the break,
I thought, wait a minute, let's go to let's go
to ABC News to that clipping service. Let's go to

(19:03):
our gravy and service, let's go clip through it. So
I did a work Now. I started that with pretty
narrow word searches Spain, Portugal blackout, Europe electrical blackout. Zero results,
zero results, zero results. So then I thought, or Dragon suggested,
we'll just go broad just type in.

Speaker 3 (19:25):
Spain, straight up Spain, Spain, see what happens.

Speaker 1 (19:27):
So I finally I typed in Spain and I get
seventy four results, and I just and before I look
at the dates, I just look down. I see, oh,
there's the Prime Minister of Spain. I bet that's it.
Oh no, this is from January twenty second of this year,
in which he's talking about putting an end to anonymity

(19:49):
on social media. So then I look, oh, here's one
from Oh here's one from yesterday from NBC News.

Speaker 3 (19:58):
Nice.

Speaker 1 (19:59):
So I think, oh, here it is NBC News covered it.
Here's what NBC News said yesterday.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
A South Florida man charged with murder following the disappearance
of his estranged wife in Spain has died by suicide.

Speaker 1 (20:15):
Oh never mind, No, they uh, they're they're they're not
covering it either. There's and and and dragon's been searching through.
I mean, at least at least some of the major
news outlets are at least putting it up the story
on their website, but they're not talking to you about

(20:37):
the who, what, where, when, and why that these blackouts occurred.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
And it's not like they went to one renewable four
years ago and then this blackout happened.

Speaker 3 (20:50):
It's a week, well, it's.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
A week that they went they had they could claim
one hundred percent renewable.

Speaker 3 (20:57):
Correct, they've been on this The point that.

Speaker 1 (20:59):
Is, I think the reason the cabal does want to
cover this is they've been on this path a lot
longer than we had.

Speaker 2 (21:06):
This upward trajectory that I did find multiple stories in
the past, late last year and earlier last year. Yeah
we made it to sixty percent renewable. Yeah, we made
it just a seventies percent renewable. So there are those
stories out there that happened multiple times throughout last year
twenty twenty four.

Speaker 3 (21:22):
Yeah, but you can you.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
Could probably say that, hey, wait a minute, this this
thing that happened a week ago, might good possibly be
the cause of the problem that we're having.

Speaker 1 (21:36):
A Yeah, yeah, so the cabal does not want you
to know about one generally what happened. Oh, there was
just a black I mean because black houps do occur.
Even when you have full inertia created electricity by nuclear

(21:57):
or coal or or natural gas, you're still gonna have
blackouts because well the s word happens, uh, you know,
a substation goes down, or the you know, a power
plant gets damaged, or or there is cyber attack, which

(22:17):
we're going to move into in just a second. But
it's not because you've put your entire grid onto these
renewable sources and they just happen to be unreliable. They
don't want you to know that. I want you to
know that because as is true in Colorado, it's probably

(22:39):
true in your state. There are groups just like here
in Colorado, the Democrats and in particular the governor and
the mayor of Denver all want to push, push, push
for more renewables, more electric you know, go think about
the the the dichotomy, the stupid, the stupid dichotomy. If I,

(22:59):
if I could use that phrase of Mike Johnson and
Jared Polis wanting to push, push, push for more renewables,
more unreliable, non inertiap generating electricity from wind and solar
at the same time that they want to have more

(23:22):
and more of your homes, transportation, office buildings, whatever it is,
done by electricity. It's like they are deliberately put you on,
putting you on a path to failure. And that's why
they don't want to talk about it. It's precisely why

(23:43):
they don't want to talk about it, which is precisely
why I do want to talk about it, because I've
been in those situations where there is no power, and
I can tell you it is not pleasant. Ask anybody
in Florida go back to two thousand and four when
Florida was hit by four hurricanes. Now you've got the grid,

(24:07):
FP and L Florida power and light was just decimated
and it took for the you know, for the for
the very last person. You know, you can restore the
generation capability, you can you can go fix the power plant,
and you can start generating electricity, but the electricity has

(24:29):
to be transmitted, so you've got to start rebuilding the
transmission lines. When you start rebuilding the transmission lines, you
can start you can start rebuilding the main feeder lines.
But at some point you've got to get into the neighborhoods,
you've got to get into the central business district. And
there's always somebody that's gonna be the last person. That's
gonna be the last person on the block over there
on the corner. Maybe it could be in the middle,

(24:50):
but you're gonna be the last person to finally get
hooked up. And there were people that waited months to
get hooked back up. And that was with that's not
relying on wind and solar. That's that's because of Mother
Nature destroying, you know, a power plant, which is another
reason why you have to use nuclear, because a nuclear
power plant can withstand a Category five hurricane or or

(25:14):
you know, an ees five tornadoes. So, yeah, more nuclears
right Whereas where I want to go, But let's go
back to Spain for a moment, because there's a problem
with I talked about the inverters. How you have to
have these inverters to convert the DC to AC so

(25:36):
you can put it in the into the grid. Well,
now we're starting to identify new vulnerabilities that go beyond
the physics of inertia. Cybersecurity researchers there there is this.
This is one thing I'll say good about a which
I rarely do about, a public private partnership between homeland

(25:57):
security and cyber security experts. They have identified dozens of
critical security flaws in solar inverter systems that are produced
by all the major manufacturers, both domestically and overseas, and
those vulnerabilities allow hackers to remotely alter the settings, they

(26:23):
can disable the systems, and they can coordinate the attacks.
Because we've gone from basic physics to electronics. Now, solar panels,
if you have one on your home, for example, have
quietly become part of the IoT, the Internet of Things.

(26:45):
You know, it's kind of funny because Dragon, I Dragon
probably doesn't realize it, but when he and I were
talking this morning about water consumption in my home, we
were actually talking about the Internet of Things because I
have in my home, and I've got lots of Internet

(27:06):
of things in my home, but one of the things
that I have that's somewhat related to utilities is a
device on my water system that detects leaks and shows
me my water consumption. I can tap it right now
and I can show that. I'll get back to home here,

(27:28):
I'm sorry, I can get right back to home and
I can show you. I can show you for example,
for example, no water well, it doesn't track my outside use,
so it doesn't It does not track the sprinkler system,
but any domestic use inside the house. The only water
use so far this morning was around four am when

(27:51):
I took a shower and took a whiz.

Speaker 3 (27:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:55):
So that's an internet of things. That's what I mean
by the Internet of things. There are millions of them
out there now. They're very lightly defended. They're all networked,
and they're all exposed. I understand. I understand those risks.

Speaker 3 (28:11):
Why.

Speaker 1 (28:11):
I don't know why someone would want to hack into
my water system.

Speaker 3 (28:14):
But they could do that.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
Well.

Speaker 1 (28:16):
The energy system now is just as vulnerable, not just
to storms or accidents, but also to remote manipulation. And
despite all the warnings, despite all the cybersecurity experts pointing
out that there is this danger, the political and regulatory
energy in Europe remained focused on what accelerating renewable deployment,

(28:41):
not upgrading the grid's basic stability. In Spain, solar generation
continued to climb rapidly. Through twenty twenty three and twenty
twenty four, they were closing coal plants, nuclear units got
retired on many spring days. By twenty twenty five, Spain's
midday solar generation exceeded its total afternoon demand, leading to

(29:01):
frequent negative electricity prices and everybody's saying hallelujah. But the
system was being pushed to the limit, and then yesterday
it broke.

Speaker 4 (29:14):
Mike, I was looking at some pictures online of where
they posted the illegals arrested at the White House, and
I noticed they forgot some more information that's needed. We
should have the date and the city and state where the.

Speaker 3 (29:29):
Event happened, the crime, Oh, that would be.

Speaker 1 (29:33):
Interesting, or the city where they were arrested, so we
could see how many sanctuary cities they were arrested in
Colorado Springs, Denver.

Speaker 3 (29:42):
You know that they might be nice to know. So
just one final comment about.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
The reason I think this story is so important for
you to understand as many aspects of it as you can.
Somebody had a great point on the text line about
when it comes to a good universe sixty two eighty
eight michae at least we won't have to worry about
Spain and Portugal getting artificial intelligence that takes a little

(30:12):
more energy. You understand why Trump wants to make us
so dominant when it comes to energy because in our electrified,
AI driven, technology driven society, when we want to, for example,

(30:34):
even if you believe in climate change, whether you believe
it's man made or not man made, we'll need energy
to mitigate the effects of any climate change that does occur.

Speaker 3 (30:45):
In terms of our.

Speaker 1 (30:46):
Ability to travel and work and manufacture and do all that.
We need energy, and it can't be wind and solar.
So the very people to keep pushing it, like Jared
Polus and all the marks across the country are simply
doing it again because that agenda is about control. And

(31:08):
the more reliable energy that we have, the more inertia
based energy that we have, nuclear oil and gas, coal, whatever,
the stronger the economy, the more investment we get, and
the more reliable of a society that we have, because

(31:30):
without that energy. Go back to the story last night,
on ABC World News tonight about the guys the people panicking.
I mean it looked like and guess what they were buying,
red milk and toilet paper. They were clearing the shelves. Now,
it was interesting that ABC News never showed because I

(31:50):
couldn't help. But wonder, wait a minute, the stores are over.
It's like a smashing grab where the store is actually
making people pay for that stuff or people just walking
out of the store with it. And then the people
lined up at the ATMs. At some point, they're gonna
get frustrated, scared. The people that can't you know, maybe
maybe they're at working, they can't get home, panic and

(32:11):
shock begin to set in and society begins to break down.
That's how important energy is to you on a day
to day basis. And the path that the Marxists are
leading us on here will destroy this country. And so
I'm not surprised at all that the cabal is not

(32:32):
talking about the details of the story to the extent
that I have, because they well, I'm not trying to
scare you or shock you. I'm trying to enlighten you.
They don't want to scare you because they're afraid you
might react and say ooh, we can't do that. You
might actually revolt against which, quite honestly, I hope you do.

(32:58):
I hope you realize how how stupid this path is
that we're on. You know, I often say, look across
the pond and there's our future. Well, there it is,
and guess what.

Speaker 3 (33:10):
It's dark.