I am very frustrated with the New York Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) net zero transition because the reality is that there are so many issues coming up with the schedule and ambition of the Climate Act that it is obvious that we need to pause implementation and figure out how best to proceed. This article explains that the ramifications of the recent blackout in Spain and Portugal need to be considered to ensure that the cause of the blackout is not a feature of all renewable-energy dependent electric systems.
I am convinced that implementation of the Climate Act net-zero mandates will do more harm than good because the proposed green energy programs are crimes against physics. The energy density of wind and solar energy is too low and the resource intermittency too variable to ever support a reliable electric system relying on those resources. I have followed the Climate Act since it was first proposed, submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan, and have written over 500 articles about New York’s net-zero transition. The opinions expressed in this article do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other organization I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.
Overview
The Climate Act established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction in GHG emissions and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050. It includes an interim target of a 100% zero-emissions electric system by 2040. The Climate Action Council (CAC) was responsible for preparing the Scoping Plan that outlined how to “achieve the State’s bold clean energy and climate agenda.” After a year-long review, the Scoping Plan was finalized at the end of 2022. Since then, the State has been trying to implement the Scoping Plan recommendations through regulations, proceedings, and legislation.
In 2023 the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) reports that solar capacity was 254 MW for utility scale facilities and 5,172 MW for behind-the-meter solar capacity. NYISO data shows that the utility-scale capacity factor was only 16.6%. The Scoping Plan Strategic Use of Low-Carbon Fuels scenario projects that 40,860 MW of total solar capacity will be needed to meet the 2040 zero-emissions target. The report projects that solar will be 30% of the total capacity of New York.
Spain and Portugal Blackout – April 29,2025
Earlier this week there was a massive blackout that started in Spain. According to Reuters:
At around 12:30 p.m. (1030 GMT), electricity generation in Spain dropped rapidly from around 27 gigawatts to just over 12 GW. The 15 GW loss was equivalent to 10% of Spain’s total installed capacity.
The sudden drop in grid load destabilized electricity flows, which require an extremely stable frequency of 50 Hertz to maintain supply. This, in turn caused a break in the Spanish and French electricity interconnection that goes through the Pyrenees mountains, resulting in the total collapse of the Spanish power system.
Spain exports electricity to Portugal, so the collapse of power in Spain quickly spread throughout the Iberian Peninsula. Some areas in France also suffered brief outages on Monday.
The blackout in Spain is projected to cost 2-4 billion euros. It is imperative to figure out what caused it. Currently there hasn’t been any definitive explanation. Nonetheless, there are reasons tp believe that it could have been caused by Spain’s reliance on wind and solar.
Potential Causes Related to Wind and Solar
Net Zero Watch described a potential problem:.
Grid analysts have suggested a high likelihood that the extent of yesterday’s blackout in Iberia was a result of the Spanish grid operating almost entirely on renewables at the time. The stability of power grids depends on so-called ‘inertia’, a resistance to rapid change that is an inherent feature of large spinning turbines, such as gas-fired power stations, but not of wind and solar farms. Too much renewables capacity on a grid can therefore mean inadequate inertia. As a result, in grids dominated by wind and solar, faults can propagate almost instantaneously across grids, leading to blackouts.
In a recent Net Zero Watch paper, entitled Blackout Risk in the Great Britan Grid, energy system analyst Kathyn Porter pointed out that the Great Britain electricity system is becoming increasingly unstable. “Large fluctuations in grid frequency – the first sign of problems – are becoming much more common”. This has not been observed in New York, yet.
Richard Ellenbogen sent an email with more information. He explained:
While the exact cause of the blackout is uncertain, both Spain and Portugal have become heavily reliant on renewables. The power loss was caused by the sudden disappearance of 15 GW of generation for five seconds. To understand the scale of the problem, the five nuclear power plants in Spain have a combined installed capacity of 7.4 GW.
There is a reliability criterion in New York that boils down to keeping enough generation capacity online and available to that if the largest source of power trips offline that the spare capacity can replace it easily. If we have to worry about all the solar going offline this quickly there is a huge challenge to resolve. Ellenbogen explained that a few minutes before the blackout, 60% of Spain’s energy was coming from solar. He also quoted an article by Robert Bryce:
The best explanation of grid inertia and its importance was published in 2016 by University of Queensland professor Simon Bartlett. In a paper written for the Energy Policy Institute of Australia, “The ‘Pressure Cooker’ Effect of Intermittent Renewable Generation on Power Systems,” Bartlett declared that the “practical upper limit for renewables is around 40% of total electricity generated.” He continued, “The scale-up of intermittent renewables not only diminishes the robustness of a particular power system but can also magnify the short and long-term risk of investing in non-renewable generation assets and the power grid itself.”
Ellenbogen also provided a link that provides an explanation about utility frequency issues for anyone that wants to read further.
Discussion
Ellenbogen closed his email with the thought that “with all of the investment that has been made in their renewable infrastructure, will we see a realistic report from the Spanish utility? An article in Reuters by Ron Bousso titled “Don’t blame renewables for Spain’s power outage” supports Ellenbogen’s concern that advocates for renewables are too invested in them to admit their proposed use may be irretrievably flawed. The article opens:
While it may be tempting to blame the unprecedented power outage that hit the Iberian peninsula this week on the rapid growth of wind and solar power in Spain, reliance on renewables is not to blame. Rather, the issue appears to be the management of renewables in the modern grid.
I love this. We don’t know what happened, but he claims it could not have been the renewables. This was followed by the description of what occurred that I quoted earlier. The next section noted that the “cause of the initial drop that led to the catastrophic cascade of events is unclear, though a collapse in Spain’s solar power system was certainly involved.” At least he admits that the solar power system was “certainly involved”. Bousso notes:
One possible contributor is the lack of so-called ‘grid inertia’ as a result of the relatively small share of nuclear and fossil fuel generation in Spain’s power mix.
Inverter-based wind and solar power, which generated just under 70% of Spain’s total electricity at the critical moment on Monday, does not involve physical rotation and therefore inertia could not compensate for the sudden loss of power.
What grid management of renewables in the modern grid is possible? His short-term solution? “An obvious short-term solution to avoid a repeat of the blackout would be to maintain a higher baseload of rotating power generation.” The current generation payment system that gives solar and wind power preferential treatment means that wholesale changes to the payment system would have to be implemented. Furthermore, if we must keep enough rotating power generation on-line to cover the sudden loss of all wind and solar due, then it begs the question why we just don’t use those resources and skip the charade of green energy.
His long-term solution is batteries:
Over the long term, however, power systems will need to invest heavily in battery capacity to store electricity as well as technologies for synchronising the grid that are critical to maintaining the 50 Hz frequency. In theory, this should be doable, as battery costs have declined sharply in recent years and are being deployed at scale around the world.
There is a critical caveat that is glossed over when he says “this should be doable”. One of the poorly understood aspects of inverter-based resources like wind and solar is the energy management systems in the inverters. It is beyond my experience to explain but the experts that I have talked to about this note that distinguishing between a problem with the equipment that requires a shutdown to protect the equipment and a grid problem that requires the system to stay on and support the system is no easy task. It gets worse when you consider that there are behind-the-meter resources like residential solar that cannot be expected to have sophisticated energy management systems. The other aspect is the cost:
But all this would still require heavy investment. While spending on new solar capacity reached around $500 billion last year, investment in grids was only at around $400 billion, becoming bottlenecks for the energy transition, according to the International Energy Agency.
Professor Simon Bartlett declared that the “practical upper limit for renewables is around 40% of total electricity generated. The New York Scoping Plan projects that in 2040 solar capacity will be 40,860 MW, onshore wind 13,096 MW, and offshore wind 13,484 MW so the renewable total is 67,440 MW. The question is whether the Scoping Plan analysis capped the amount of wind and solar output at any one time at 40%. I doubt it but this is a nuance that cannot be answered by looking at the impenetrable Scoping Plan documentation. Clearly this is another reason to pause implementation because now we know that this can be a billion-dollar risk and we don’t know how the Scoping Plan or for that matter the NYISO analyses addressed it.
Conclusion
In the coming months the green energy apologists will be saying that it is unfair to blame renewables for Spain’s power outage. My first observation is that it would be incredibly insulting to the public to say that renewables were not the original cause of the problem. The question is whether an electric system can be designed and operated to address this problem. I have the utmost respect for electric system planners and their ability to design the system to address known problems. However, given the complexity of the electric generating and transmission system I do not think that they can anticipate every potential problem that could cause a blackout. Another important consideration is whether the proposed New York electric system has incorporated features that would preclude the observed problem from happening here when we become as dependent upon inverter-based resources.
This is another reason to pause the Climate Act implementation. We simply don’t know if the proposed zero-emissions system that relies so much on wind and solar will work. If New York decides that the future electric system must be zero-emissions and it turns out that no more than 40% of the power at any time can come from wind and solar, then the only viable approach is nuclear power. Nuclear replace can replace renewables, eliminate the need for a massive backup resource to address this problem, and provide an electric system that we know can maintain current standards of reliability. Therefore, it would be prudent to pause renewable development until this issue is resolved because nuclear generation may be the only viable path to zero emissions.
Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York 