You don't want Ambrose dissecting your alibi unless it's airtight.
As the he's been listening to finance execs spew B.S. excuses for a generation.
From the Telegraph via Yahoo News, May 22:
The stench of a cover-up hangs over Spain’s giant blackout, the worst electricity failure in any developed country in modern times.
Faith in the current investigation has reached rock-bottom. The socialist government of Pedro Sánchez is trying to buy time with explanations that either make no technical sense or veer into absurdity.
Red Eléctrica, which runs the grid, is accused of stonewalling everybody.
Sources in Brussels have told The Telegraph that the authorities were conducting an experiment before the system crashed, probing how far they could push reliance on renewables in preparation for Spain’s rushed phase-out of nuclear reactors from 2027.
The government seems to have pushed the pace recklessly, before making the necessary investments in a sophisticated 21st-century smart grid capable of handling it.
One is reminded of the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, which began as a test to simulate what happens to a cooling reactor in blackout conditions. Operators ignored warnings that the Number Four reactor had too little power. It set off a cascading failure.
If it is established that the blackout was a controlled experiment that went wrong, and if this information has been withheld from the public for almost four weeks, the Spanish Left faces electoral oblivion for a political generation.
The government has de facto control over Red Eléctrica through a golden share (in breach of EU norms). It put a socialist politician and party loyalist in charge even though she had no experience in the field and faced withering criticism at the time. Her salary in this plum job is six times higher than the Spanish prime minister.
The previous chief resigned in protest over political meddling. He accused the government of pushing its green agenda with “messianic” zeal – but without taking the accompanying steps needed to pull it off.
The Spanish Association of Electrical Energy Companies (AELEC) has finally lost patience. It came close to calling the whole inquiry a travesty in a caustic statement this week.
How this saga unfolds has ramifications far beyond Spain. Blackouts always raise the ideological temperature in the culture war. Spain’s dystopian “apagón” comes at the moment of peak backlash against all things green in the Western democracies.
Old Energy and the global Right have together seized on the episode to prosecute and convict renewable power before trial, hoping to drive a stake through the heart of net zero.
“Spain reminds us that intermittent energy sources cannot replace the reliable base power provided by fossil fuels or other stable sources,” said Republican senator Steve Daines at a hearing on Capitol Hill this week.
The apagón tells us no such thing. Several countries have a higher share of renewables in the electricity mix without suffering blackouts, including the industrial powerhouse we call Germany. Sen Daines is conflating the issue of intermittency with the separate issue of inertia and grid frequency.
AELEC, which includes Endesa, IBM, Iberdrola and Schneider Electric, said the authorities had inverted the likely chain of causality. It was not the generators that failed to deliver stable power to the grid: it was the grid that failed to manage it and then automatically shut down the generators, whether solar, wind, nuclear or gas....
....MUCH MORE
Are they sure it wasn't caused by someone spilling bat soup into a transformer?
Maybe it was a raccoon dog chasing a pangolin in a substation.
Related, the introduction to May 23's "How Virologists Lost the Gain-of-Function Debate".
