After Spain's blackout, critics blamed renewable energy. It's part of a bigger attack
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Last spring, tens of millions of people lost electricity across Spain, Portugal and part of France. Trains stopped in their tracks, and people were stuck in elevators, as southwestern Europe went without power for — in some cases — more than ten hours.
Immediately, the finger-pointing began. Many people blamed solar and wind energy. Spain, one of Europe's front runners in renewable energy, gets about 46% of its power from solar and wind, according to the think tank Ember— sometimes more than 70%.
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In the hours after the outage The Daily Mail published the headline "Could renewable energy be to blame for huge Spain blackout?"
And on the day of the outage U.S. energy secretary and former fracking executive Chris Wright went on CNBC to talk about the outage and criticized solar and wind. "When you hitch your wagon to the weather," Wright said, "it's just a risky endeavor."
The idea that solar and wind are inherently risky and unreliable is a common talking point for critics of renewable energy, often repeated by groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry. It's false.
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