Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Green activists who sabotaged the Berlin grid last week may not have convinced anyone that carbon dioxide was a threat, but they have raised awareness that Germany needs more diesel generators, and thermal power plants.
Green activists who sabotaged the Berlin grid last week may not have convinced anyone that carbon dioxide was a threat, but they have raised awareness that Germany needs more diesel generators, and thermal power plants.
On January 3rd, left-wing extremists caused the longest blackout in Berlin since World War II, leaving 100,000 people without heating or electricity for up to five days in midwinter. Suddenly local utilities have realized how vulnerable Germany is and are calling for a “national crisis reserve of mobile generators and heating systems.” And they want several hundred megawatts of it.
The association of local utilities (VKU) put out a press release calling for this new emergency reserve to be set up and spread around the country so it can restore power within 24 hours. They also ask for someone to clear away the bureaucratic red tape that slowed down the helpers, specifically mentioning the odd thing that must have delayed the response this time — like “responsibility, permits, liability, costs, labor rules, and insurance.”
They paid homage to the “decentralized energy supply base on renewables” which could have (but didn’t) mitigate the damage. They probably had to write that. They also want to add in “grid meshing” or more interconnectors –presumably to make it harder for vandals to knock out one key line. But it will be “expensive” they say (isn’t it always). It’s just another bucket of money needed to be added to the renewable’s bills.
Germany’s municipal utilities are calling for a national crisis reserve of mobile generators and heating systems. These should be dispatched in an emergency to restore the electricity supply within 24 hours, argued industry lobby group VKU.
The VKU said the emergency reserve would enable the creation of temporary “island electricity grids” independent from the main supply system. These could be run by emergency power generators, which mostly run on diesel, combined heat and power plants, and gas turbines that could be activated with “a single phone call.” The association stated that this emergency reserve should have a combined capacity of several hundred megawatts.
In other lessons from Germany, Prof Vahrenholt points out that converting everyone on gas or petrol to electricity only makes a blackout so much worse and the nation more vulnerable.
Frontier Economics estimates the total cost of the energy transition until 2045 at an unaffordable 4,800 to 5,400 billion euros.
But now, the attack in Berlin demonstrates to us that such an energy system, based solely on electricity, is highly vulnerable. We are learning that when the power fails, the heat supply also fails — at least when it is supposed to be generated by heat pumps. And to make matters worse, we are learning that in freezing temperatures, heat pumps face total loss due to bursting pipes. This particular “warning label” was certainly not included in the “Habeck heating law,” which the CDU-SPD federal government intends to continue seamlessly. The content of the law will remain the same, but to ensure citizens don’t quite realize it, the name of the law is to be changed.
We are also learning that during a large-scale power outage, electric vehicles can only help if they happened to be charged before the “bang.” Otherwise, this utility also fails.
Home batteries and electric cars won’t be much use if the terrorists attack just before they get recharged.
ADDENDUM: Let’s not forget their manifesto for grid sabotage:
“In the greed for energy, the earth is being depleted, sucked dry, burned, ravaged, burned down, raped, destroyed,” the group, which is listed by Berlin’s intelligence services as a left-wing extremist organization, said in the letter.
“The aim of the action is to cause significant damage to the gas industry and the greed for energy,” its authors wrote. The group has used similar means to communicate in the past, and Berlin police believed the letter to be genuine.
A Germany-wide power outage is not a light switch problem – but the moment when the physical limits of green energy policy become ruthlessly visible
Who does not remember the promises? The energy transition should not only save the climate but also guarantee security of supply. Wind, sun and batteries – the holy triumvirate of the green future. Decentralized, democratic, digital. What is often concealed is that in the event of a nationwide blackout, this future system will turn into a pile of expensive electronics that do not produce a single volt. Not because the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine – but because the physical foundations are missing to bring the grid back to life in the first place.
The current power outage in Berlin, which paralyzed about 50,000 households for four days, provides a taste of what is in store for Germany when the last conventional power plants are taken off the grid. And no, it’s not about scaremongering – it’s about physics.
The grid is not a power distributor, but a machine
First, let’s look at the technical reality of a blackout. The European power grid runs at a grid frequency of 50 hertz – a precisely synchronized machine in which all generators rotate in unison. After a total collapse, there is: no reference frequency, no voltage, no communication over the network. Everything has to be synchronized from scratch, step by step, like a house of cards that you build in absolute darkness.
This is not a “reboot” as you know it from the computer. It is the laborious reconstruction of a highly complex system, lasting several hours to several days, in which the slightest miscalculation leads to an immediate renewed shutdown.
Black Start: The Underrated Ability
Only a few power plants can start without an external power supply. According to the Federal Network Agency, there are 174 black-start capable turbines with a capacity of at least 10 MW (as of 2020) in Germany – sounds like a lot, but of these, only 26 are actually earmarked by the transmission system operators for grid reconstruction. This is the strategic reserve for an emergency.
The following are primarily:
Hydroelectric power plants
Some gas turbines (with battery support)
Few specially equipped power plants
On the other hand, the following are not eligible for black starts:
Nuclear power plants (irony of history: long since shut down)
Most coal-fired power plants (in the process of being shut down)
Wind and photovoltaic systems (grid-following)
Large battery storage systems (without upstream supply)
You read that right: The entire infrastructure of the energy transition is useless in the event of a blackout. Not restricted use. Useless.
Why is the reconstruction taking so long?
A large power plant needs between 5 and 10 percent of its nominal output as its own needs to start up – for pumps, lubrication, cooling, control and control technology. Without mains or black start source: standstill. And even when the first power plants are up and running, the real problem begins: the balance between generation and load must be exactly right. Too much burden? Frequency drop, shutdown. Too little load? Frequency surplus, shutdown.
That’s why consumers are being connected gradually: first critical infrastructure, then household’s region-by-region, industrial companies come to the very end. The net is built up like a fragile house of cards – one wrong move, and everything collapses again.
In addition, there are failed protection relays in substations that have to be reset manually. Cables must be tested for short circuits. Communication is now only via emergency power generators. Typical time frames for Germany-wide reconstruction: 24 to 72 hours – under ideal conditions. With consequential damage, much longer.
The problem of renewables: grid-following instead of grid-forming
Now it gets interesting. Almost all of today’s wind and photovoltaic plants are grid-following. They need an existing voltage and frequency to attach themselves to. After a blackout, the following applies: No grid, no feed-in. Even in bright sunshine and strong winds: 0 megawatts.
At this point, the argument regularly comes: “Then let’s just take battery storage as a buffer.” Nice theory. Practical reality: Batteries do not provide physical inertia. They stabilize the frequency only via control algorithms – highly sensitive to load jumps, highly software-dependent. Who sets the first cycle after a total failure? Who synchronizes thousands of inverters so that they do not regulate against each other? A bug, a communication failure, a misparameterization – and the chaos is perfect.
Grid-Forming Inverters: The Theoretical Solution Without Practical Proof
The answer of the energy transition engineers is: “Grid-forming inverters.” These are intended to digitally replicate the lack of network formation of synchronous generators. Sounds good. However, as of today, it only works in theory and in small pilot projects.
The problems:
Hardly tested on a large scale so far
No long-term experience for national networks
Extremely complex protection and coordination issues
Highly software-dependent
This is not a physical anchor like a rotating flywheel, but a digital replacement model. A software update can stabilize the system – or cause it to crash. Although the European grid codes discuss requirements for grid-forming functionalities, Germany is miles away from a comprehensive, tested implementation.
Fraunhofer ISE and other research institutions are diligently developing algorithms and testing prototypes. But there are worlds between a test setup and a nationwide system change – and years, if not decades.
Dark doldrums plus blackout: The worst-case scenario
Now imagine the following scenario: A cold January day, little wind, no sun, the storage facilities are already partially empty (because they had to support the supply in the days before). Then: blackout.
What happens? No feed-in from wind and solar. No inertia in the system. No safe reconstruction path.
In such a system, Germany would de facto be dependent on neighboring countries – French nuclear power plants, Scandinavian hydropower, Polish coal – to “pull” voltage and frequency into the German grid and enable a new start. Energy sovereignty? Not given. Green independence ends where physics begins.
What politicians conceal
The Federal Network Agency classifies the risk of a long-lasting power outage in Germany as “very unlikely”. This may be statistically correct – Germany has one of the most reliable power grids in the world with an average of 11 minutes of outage per year. But this statistic applies to today’s system of conventional baseload power plants that serve as anchors.
What happens when these anchors disappear? When the last coal-fired power plants are taken off the grid and replaced by software-controlled inverters? Will the grid become more stable – or more vulnerable?
Herbert Saurugg, Austrian blackout expert, has been warning for years: “Just because you can start a power plant illegally does not mean that you can also manage grid reconstruction.” And further: The smaller the turbines, the more difficult and lengthy the start-up.
A 100% RE system would have, in the event of a nationwide blackout:
No robust black start capability
No physical mesh formation
High software and coordination risks
Extreme dependence on weather and foreign countries
Significantly longer reconstruction times than today
In extreme cases, the network could no longer be safely started up independently.
Berlin as a portent?
The current power outage in Berlin – caused by a fire at a cable bridge – is an example of how fragile even well-developed urban grids are. It took four days for all 45,000 households to have electricity again. Four days of cold, four days without functioning heaters, without hot water, without light. According to the network operator, the complete repair will take weeks or months.
And that was only a regionally limited outage with a functioning environment that could help. What would happen in the event of a Germany-wide blackout? Who will help then?
Conclusion: Physics beats ideology
A Germany-wide blackout does not last long because German engineers are incompetent. It takes a long time because the power grid is a high-precision, synchronously running machine – and you can’t start machines cold at the same time.
The energy transition ignores this reality. It replaces rotating masses with algorithms, physical inertia with virtual inertial systems, proven black start capability with theoretical concepts. And hopes that everything will work in an emergency.
This is not energy policy – this is Russian roulette with the security of supply of an industrialized country.
The inconvenient truth is that a power grid needs inertia, synchronicity and startability. These are characteristics of rotating machines, not inverters. As long as this basic truth is not accepted, the energy transition will remain an expensive experiment at the expense of security of supply.
The next blackout is sure to come. The only question is: How long will it take for the light to come back on?
More bad news for fragile, weather dependent power generation systems – but send more money.
Climate change could make ‘droughts’ for wind power 15% longer, study says
30 July 2025 11:24
Extreme “wind droughts” that reduce power output from turbines for extended periods could become 15% longer by the end of the century across much of the northern hemisphere under a moderate warming scenario.
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According to the study, “prominent” wind droughts have already been documented in Europe, the US, northeastern China, Japan and India.
As the planet warms, wind droughts will become longer in the northern hemisphere and mid-latitudes – especially across the US, northeastern China, Russia and much of Europe – the paper says.
The study – which focuses on onshore wind – warns that “prolonged” wind droughts could “threaten global wind power security”.
However, they add that research into the effects of climate change on wind supply can help “prepare for and mitigate the adverse impacts” of these prolonged low-wind events.
Prolonged low-wind events, termed wind droughts, threaten wind turbine electricity generation, yet their future trajectories remain poorly understood. Here, using hourly data from 21 IPCC models, we reveal robust increasing trends in wind drought duration at both global and regional scales by 2100, across low- and high-CO2 scenarios. These trends are primarily driven by declining mid-latitude cyclone frequencies and Arctic warming. Notably, the duration of 25-year return events is projected to increase by up to 20% under low warming scenarios and 40% under very high warming scenarios in northern mid-latitude countries, threatening energy security in these densely populated areas. Additionally, record-breaking wind drought extremes will probably become more frequent in a warming climate, particularly in eastern North America, western Russia, northeastern China and north-central Africa. Our analysis suggests that ~20% of existing wind turbines are in regions at high future risk of record-breaking wind drought extremes, a factor not yet considered in current assessments.Read more:
If climate change were to make this worse, driving greater weather extremes, alternating between wind droughts and the kind of destructive storms which blacken the skies, blast solar panels with giant hail, and wreak havoc on anything fragile and weather exposed in their path, there is no place for renewables in the world’s future energy mix.
Anyone who thinks a few minutes or even a few hours of battery backup can make this right is math challenged.
The Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) mandates that Dominion Energy, the state’s big electric utility, rapidly shift its power generation to wind and solar. Dominion’s latest Integrated Resources Plan (IRP) provides dramatic evidence that this shift does not work, making blackouts inevitable. Making it work would be fantastically expensive, with the average customer paying over $40,000 for batteries by 2030.
The Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) mandates that Dominion Energy, the state’s big electric utility, rapidly shift its power generation to wind and solar. Dominion’s latest Integrated Resources Plan (IRP) provides dramatic evidence that this shift does not work, making blackouts inevitable. Making it work would be fantastically expensive, with the average customer paying over $40,000 for batteries by 2030.
The graphic summarizes Dominion’s VCEA compliance plan. It is a vertical bar showing the installed mix of generating capacity in 2030. The vertical scale is megawatts (MW) and the height of the bar is the projected maximum summer power demand for that year which is about 33,000 MW.
The bar is divided into different colored segments for each generator type such as solar, wind, gas, nuclear, etc. The height of each segment is the amount of installed capacity at that time in MW.
Dominion actually flags solar pointing out that it makes up 23% of the available capacity. They also point out that solar, wind and batteries together make up 34% of capacity. Note that the battery segment is very small and batteries are not generators. The bar also includes a little bit of imported power making installed capacity less than peak demand.
The problem is obvious. Peak summer demand typically occurs after 4 pm when there is no solar generation. Moreover it is often caused by a stagnant high pressure system called a Bermuda high with very low winds so there is no wind power either. Plus these highs are regional in scale so the neighbors may have nothing to sell.
If there is no solar, no wind and no imports then we are over 34% short of the power needed to keep the lights on. Clearly there will be a blackout. No solar alone will do it for that matter. Nor are these inconvenient short term rolling blackouts. Being 20 to 30% short is a prescription for catastrophe.
This is where batteries come in. It is often claimed that batteries can make renewables reliable so let’s now see what that would take in this VCEA case.
Here is a very simple back of the envelope analysis to just give the scale of the batteries required to prevent blackouts.
Peak need is about 33,000 MW in 2030. Dispatchable capacity is around 20,000 MW leaving 13,000 MW. Solar is about 10,000 MW but for simplicity let us generously assume it too is 13,000 as though non-performing wind and import capacities were not there. For one day this leaves 16 hours with no solar and demand at 13,000 that must come from the batteries.
This is a need of 208,000 MWh of batteries. The battery capacity in the graphic is around 10,000 MWh or basically nothing. Note we are assuming 100% battery charge and discharge when reality is more like 60-80%.
At the typical $500,000 or so per MWh the battery facility capital cost is an incredible $104 billion. That is $104,000,000,000. Given Dominion’s 2.6 million customers this averages a nice round $40,000 per customer for batteries. Dominion ignores this simple fact.
But it gets much worse because there is no spare generating capacity to charge the batteries. Given a typical multi-day near peak heatwave several hundred billion dollars worth of batteries would be required to prevent a massive sustained blackout. This is likely physically impossible but it is certainly economically ruinous.
Thus we have the VCEA dilemma. Rapidly switching to solar and wind as proposed in the Dominion IRP for 2030 either leads to catastrophic blackouts or economic ruin. The “clean economy” is no economy.
The obvious solution is to repeal the Virginia Clean Economy Act.
The headlines practically write themselves. If you believe the hype, we’ll soon be zipping across continents on a single charge, stopping only long enough to grab a coffee while our car slurps down enough energy to power a small hospital.
Well, it’s happened again. The tech press is in full swoon, the Twitterati are high-fiving in the digital aisles, and the battery boys at Huawei are strutting around like they’ve just reinvented fire.
“Solid-state battery! 1,800 miles of range! Five-minute charge!”
The headlines practically write themselves. If you believe the hype, we’ll soon be zipping across continents on a single charge, stopping only long enough to grab a coffee while our car slurps down enough energy to power a small hospital. Here’s Huawei’s claim:
Huawei, the Chinese technology giant, has recently made waves in the electric vehicle (EV) industry with claims of a groundbreaking solid-state battery that could redefine the future of transportation.
According to reports from TechRadar, Huawei asserts that this new battery technology can deliver an astonishing range of up to 1,800 miles on a single charge while achieving a full recharge in under five minutes. If verified, these specifications could position Huawei as a formidable player in the EV battery race, challenging established leaders like Tesla, BYD, and CATL.
But, as usual, reality is hiding out in the fine print, ducking the spotlight while the PR machine does its victory lap. Nobody wants to talk about physics. Nobody asks how, exactly, you’re supposed to pour Niagara Falls through a garden hose.
Let’s start with the chemistry, because that’s what gets the headlines. Huawei, CATL, BYD, and every battery startup with a logo and a LinkedIn page are racing to show off lab results with solid electrolytes, nitrogen-doped sulfide electrodes, and energy densities that would make a Tesla blush. Yes, it’s impressive. Yes, it’s real science. Yes, the batteries likely exist, even if only in lab versions.
But chemistry is only half the story—the easy half, frankly. The hard part is what comes after: getting all that energy in and out of the battery without melting the neighborhood. Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope math, my favorite kind.
Charging a 600 kWh battery in 5 minutes isn’t a “nice to have” kind of deal. It’s a “requires the power output of a small hydroelectric dam” situation.
Energy equals power multiplied by time. So: 600 kWh divided by (5/60) hours is 7,200 kW—7.2 megawatts—per car. That’s not a typo. MEGAwatts. Per car. That’s the kind of load that would make your local substation break out in hives.
And it’s not just the grid. You’ll need:
High-voltage wiring thicker than your wrist
Transformers the size of shipping containers
Power cables with active cooling, or else they’ll melt like a cheap extension cord at a Fourth of July barbecue
Buffer batteries to keep the grid from doing a faceplant every time someone plugs in their new wonder-car
And don’t get me started on “green electricity.” The fantasy is that we’ll run this whole show on wind and solar, but unless you’re planning to build a solar farm the size of Luxembourg in every city, you’re dreaming. Fast charging at this scale is not compatible with the current “green” grid, and won’t be for decades—if ever. A couple of charging poles and a few rooftop panels aren’t going to cut it. We’re talking industrial-scale power plants, and even then, you’re right on the edge.
Here’s the cold hand of physics. Car batteries are at around 400 volts or so. 7.2 megawatts divided by 400 volts gives us 18,000 amperes. Per car. The typical US house has a 90 amp service, coming in on large overhead or underground cables. I’m sure you can see the problem …
To deliver 18,000 amps per car, you need connectors that look more like fire hoses than anything you’ve seen at a gas station. These electrical cables must be actively cooled, or they’ll turn into modern art. Cables are rated by their “ampacity”, which is how many amps of electricity they can carry safely without overheating. According to the NEC ampacity charts, the largest standard copper wire size, 2000 kcmil, has an ampacity of only 750 amps at 90°C, and we need an ampacity of 18,000 amps. (A “cmil” is a circular mil, which is the area of a circle 1/1000 of an inch in diameter. A “kcmil” is a thousand cmils. And no, I don’t know how many cmils there are in a bushel …)
A 2000 kcmil cable is about an inch and a half (3.8 cm) in diameter. Here’s a single 2000 kcmil underground direct-burial cable … and you’d need 24 of them to handle 18,000 amps.
The problem is that if you put more amperes of electricity through the cable and exceed the cable’s ampacity, it melts. Which is why you’d need a serious cooling system for charging cables if they are to be of a useable size … and if the cooling fails, you don’t want to be anywhere near the cable.
And if a few hundred cars plug in at once without a buffer? Say hello to an instant blackout.
The battery companies don’t care. Their job is chemistry. The rest is “someone else’s problem”—which is to say, yours. Or your city’s. Or your utility’s.
Who’s going to pay for the grid upgrades, the transformers, the buffer batteries, the land, the cooling systems, the huge connectors, the maintenance, the insurance? If you don’t own an electric car, are you ready to pay for your neighbor’s five-minute charge via higher taxes or utility rates? And if you do own an EV, are you prepared to shell out $500–600 per charge just to cover the infrastructure?
Here’s the bottom line: rapid charging is a lab dream, not a real-world solution for EVs. Technically, it absolutely works. Practically, fuggetaboudit. For most people, charging will still be a 30–90 minute affair—if not longer. Maybe that’s why Toyota, BMW, and Mercedes are quietly tiptoeing back to hydrogen, hybrids, and expensive e-fuels made from hydrogen plus CO2.
The electric car revolution is here, but the real revolution that’s needed isn’t in the battery—it’s in the ground, in the cables, in the substations, in the cable cooling systems, in the grid, in the generators, in the transformers, and in the cold, hard economics of power delivery. So before you run out and buy that car with “five-minute charging,” maybe ask yourself: Who’s building the grid? Who’s cooling the cables? And who, exactly, is paying for this party?
Because until someone answers those questions, the only thing getting charged in five minutes is your credit card.
My best to all, petrolheads and ampereheads alike.
w.
Yeah, I know you know, and I’ll tell you again anyhow: When you comment, please quote the exact words you are discussing. It avoids endless misunderstandings.
So that’s alright then! Nothing to worry about.
Nothing to do with the Spanish government’s obsession with renewable energy! Just blame it all on bureaucrats and capitalism.
Nothing to do with the Spanish government’s obsession with renewable energy! Just blame it all on bureaucrats and capitalism.
Except, of course, it was solar power, which was at front and centre of the blackouts, a fact which even the whitewash report could not disguise.
The catalyst for the blackout was a sudden loss of 2.2GW of electricity at Granada substation in southern Spain. The report does not appear to address why this happened, which you might have thought was crucial! But it is believed that one or two solar farms stopped transmitting because of negative prices – these resulted from too much solar generation for too little demand, and this is exactly how the market is supposed to work; negative prices lead to less generation, thus bringing the system into balance.
However solar power now makes up such a large part of Spain’s electricity (about 60% at the time of the blackouts), that the very system of negative pricing is a threat in itself to the grid.
As soon as that 2.2GW disappeared, voltages in the local grid plummeted, leading to a complicated chain reaction of grid disconnections. Within 30 seconds the entire Iberian Peninsula was experiencing a complete blackout.
The Government whitewash tried to put the blame on the grid operator Red Eléctrica not making sure enough gas power was on the system at the time, which might have provided enough inertia to provide the crucial seconds needed to stabilise the system.
The report, by the way. was presented by Sara Aagesen, Spain’s minister of “ecological transition and demographic challenge” – I suggest that in future, the Spanish Government makes sure its energy system is run by an energy expert, rather than a climate activist. According to Grok:
Aagesen graduated from the Complutense University of Madrid with a degree in chemical engineering, specializing in environmental affairs. Since 2002, she has worked extensively in climate action and energy transition, starting at the Spanish Office for Climate Change (OECC)
But it is Spanish government policy to minimise and eventually get rid of gas power. It was only two weeks before the blackouts that they were bragging that Spain’s grid ran entirely on renewable energy for the first time (a claim, by the way, which was fake!).
You can hardly overload your grid with intermittent renewables and then complain that there was not enough gas power to deal with those problems of intermittency. Neither can you mandate those renewables and then blame the grid operator for failing to deal with the problems created.
Despite the BBC’s distortions, the facts are very, very simple. If Spain had been running their grid with considerably more gas power and considerably less solar power, those blackouts categorically would not have occurred.
What is noticeable is that since the blackout, Spain has kept much more gas power running. Just before the blackouts, only 2GW of gas power was being produced, 7% of the total load.
In the last day or two, gas power has not dropped below 5GW.
The city of Cannes was hit by a five-hour power outage on Saturday morning ahead of the film festival’s awards ceremony, with electricity finally returning around 3:30 p.m. local time. Despite the technical challenges, a festival rep previously told Variety that the closing ceremony would “proceed as planned” after the Palais des Festivals “switched to an independent power supply.”
According to Franceinfo, the cause of the outage may be foul play with two arson acts reported overnight and several power lines pylons were discovered to have been sawn off in the Alpes-Maritimes.
What is this mysterious “independent power supply”? Western media sources might be coy about naming the agency which rescued Cannes, but on this occasion the French media were up to the challenge of reporting the news.
Power failure in Cannes and in the Alpes-Maritimes: “serious acts of degradation” are at the origin of the incident
Two arsons were reported, while three pillars of an electric pylon located in Villeneuve-Loubet were then sawn Saturday morning.
Article written byfranceinfo France Televisions Published on 24/05/2025 12:17 Updated on 05/24/025 16:30
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From generators at the Palais des Festivals
This incident had consequences on the Cannes Film Festival, which must end in the late afternoon with the presentation of the Palme d’Or. The screening of the film Sirât was interrupted on the Croisette on Saturday morning, reports France 3 Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (New window), which also reports disruptions in the city and at the station. But the situation is improving in the city since AFP journalists noticed the resumption of traffic lights around the Palais des Festivals in the early afternoon.
What makes this more amusing, the 2025 Cannes film festival, which owes its successful conclusion to portable fossil fuel power, was dominated by depictions of imaginary apocalypse – including the fake climate crisis.
It’s the end of the world and the Cannes Film Festival does not feel fine
CANNES, France (AP) — “Is this what the end of the world feels like?”
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As much as Cannes basks in the Côte d’Azur sunshine, storm clouds have been all over its movie screens at the festival, which on Monday passed the halfway point. Portents of geopolitical doom are everywhere in a lineup that’s felt unusually in sync with the moment. Tom Cruise, in “Mission: Impossible – Final Awakening,” has battled the AI apocalypse. Raoul Peck, in “Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5,” has summoned the author’s totalitarianism warnings for today. Even the new Wes Anderson (“The Phoenician Scheme”) is about an oligarch.
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It’s not just geopolitical tremors quaking on movie screens in Cannes. Climate change and natural disasters are on the minds of filmmakers, too, sometimes in the most unlikely of movies.
There is no news yet on the identity or motivation of the pylon saboteurs. They might have been metal thieves – metal theft is a serious problem in Europe. But who knows, perhaps they were just ordinary people who were fed up with unwatchable films which lecture the audience about the director’s woke delusions.
AEP is getting ever more desperate to defend his green energy agenda.
In his latest piece in the Telegraph, he tries to blame the blackouts in Spain on the Socialist Government, while ignoring the green elephant in the room.
AEP is getting ever more desperate to defend his green energy agenda.
In his latest piece in the Telegraph, he tries to blame the blackouts in Spain on the Socialist Government, while ignoring the green elephant in the room:
The stench of a cover-up hangs over Spain’s giant blackout, the worst electricity failure in any developed country in modern times.
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.
I don’t know what this secret experiment was. There has been no secret about the rapid rollout of wind and solar capacity in recent years. As most of this is embedded, the Spanish grid have no means of controlling it.
I don’t recall AEP writing in the past that this insanely fast rollout should be stopped until billions had been spent strengthening the grid. Nor, for that matter, have I seen the same warnings about Miliband’s equally reckless pursuit of Clean Power 2030 here.
Nor is there any evidence that his so-called smart grid would have stopped the blackouts, which energy experts, unlike those with a green agenda like AEP, have been warning about for years.
While we await the official verdict, it seems clear that a surge in solar power at a local level overloaded the grid, which, partly due to a lack of inertia, quickly spread across the country.
AEP then goes on to accuse energy experts of conflating inertia and intermittency:
“Foes of green energy like to mix up the inertia problem with the separate issue of what happens when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. The short-term answer is batteries, cryogenic compressed air and interconnectors. Spain lacks enough of any of them.”
In fact they are both intricately related. It is the inherent uncontrollable variability of wind and solar power that can trigger problems in the first place, and it is lack of inertia which then makes it much more difficult to contain the problem afterwards.
With a grid based on dispatchable power, neither issue is a problem.
Note too that yet again he is off in Fantasyland, claiming that batteries and compressed air can solve the problem of intermittency, when they are designed just to fill in for a few minutes or so.
He is right about one thing though – there will be a cover up, but just not the one he imagines. My guess is that the mad rush to renewable energy will be absolved of any blame, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.
Two insiders at the US Dept of Energy say they have found covert devices inside solar panel inverters and batteries that would allow them to communicate with China. Even though firewalls have been put in place, these backdoor devices could operate around them.
Nice grid you have there, shame if someone suddenly… switched it off
Two insiders at the US Dept of Energy say they have found covert devices inside solar panel inverters and batteries that would allow them to communicate with China. Even though firewalls have been put in place, these backdoor devices could operate around them.
Last August a Dutch white hat hacker got into 4 million panels in 150 countries in an effort to warn the West that major infrastructure was vulnerable. A month later an Australian cyber expert warned that a foreign hacker could turn our home batteries into “pager-bombs” too. If a hostile power turned off the overcharge protection on a sunny day, millions of solar panels would be pumping excess electricity into batteries that have no safety cut off. A few houses start to go off like popcorn, and an hour later we’re all living at the Western Front. How exactly would our firemen cope if 1 in 100 homes caught fire at the same time, and then we had a blackout? Anyone?
Individual solar panel inverters are generally too small to trigger national security assessments, but right now at lunchtime solar power is the largest single source of electricity in Australia — making 13 gigawatts out of 27. That’s half our national supply. In summer it’s worse.
It’s a win every which way for China if we install more solar panels. Not only are we paying them for the panels, and sanctifying their slavery, but we set fire to our electricity prices, driving our factories to China where they burn our coal. Now to ice this Gridkill Gateau we hand them a backdoor for sabotage or extortion should they ever get the urge to use it.
This is Fall of Rome type stuff, and we’ve got Chris ‘Blackout’ Bowen to save us…
The only good thing about this is that while we were destroying our industrial base with solar panels anyway, the hidden transmitters are so overtly hostile, so in-your-face nasty, that sleeping Westerners might even wake up. Holy smoke. Does anyone think those secret radios were put there to help us?
LONDON, May 14 (Reuters) – U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said.
However, rogue communication devices not listed in product documents have been found in some Chinese solar power inverters by U.S experts who strip down equipment hooked up to grids to check for security issues, the two people said. Over the past nine months, undocumented communication devices, including cellular radios, have also been found in some batteries from multiple Chinese suppliers, one of them said.
The rogue components provide additional, undocumented communication channels that could allow firewalls to be circumvented remotely, with potentially catastrophic consequences, the two people said.
“We know that China believes there is value in placing at least some elements of our core infrastructure at risk of destruction or disruption,” said Mike Rogers, a former director of the U.S. National Security Agency. “I think that the Chinese are, in part, hoping that the widespread use of inverters limits the options that the West has to deal with the security issue.”
In November, solar power inverters in the U.S. and elsewhere were disabled from China, highlighting the risk of foreign influence over local electricity supplies and causing concern among government officials, three people familiar with the matter said. Reuters was unable to determine how many inverters were switched off, or the extent of disruption to grids. The DOE declined to comment on the incident.
The Communist Party could have said that they would never sanction such a hostile act, and it must be a company acting alone, but they didn’t:
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington said: “We oppose the generalisation of the concept of national security, distorting and smearing China’s infrastructure achievements.”
Infrastructure achievements indeed. A Freudian slip?
There is plenty of risk to share around:
The European Solar Manufacturing Council estimates over 200 GW of European solar power capacity is linked to inverters made in China – equivalent to more than 200 nuclear power plants. At the end of last year, there was 338 GW of installed solar power in Europe, according to industry association SolarPower Europe.
Though Europe is saved, somewhat, by having lots of interconnectors and not much sun. That is, apart from Portugal, Spain and Greece, and we still don’t know what caused that blackout that started in the solar farms?
Whereas authorities currently remain unclear regarding the cause or causes of a major power disruption turning off lights and paralyzing the lives of approximately 55 million people across Spain, Portugal, and southern France, they might serve as prescient lessons regarding the importance of securing power grids from combined green energy vulnerabilities and cyber-terrorist threats.
Whereas authorities currently remain unclear regarding the cause or causes of a major power disruption turning off lights and paralyzing the lives of approximately 55 million people across Spain, Portugal, and southern France, they might serve as prescient lessons regarding the importance of securing power grids from combined green energy vulnerabilities and cyber-terrorist threats.
It began suddenly on a sunny day when within a few seconds, 15 gigawatts of energy suddenly dropped from Spain’s supply — equivalent to 60% of the electricity being consumed at the time — collapsing the southern France throughout the Iberian Peninsula.
Electrical outages left many people trapped in underground metro tunnels and on trains for hours, with others forced to walk along the tracks to access comfortable locations or vehicular transit to planned destinations.
Flights were canceled to and from dozens of major Iberian cities, including Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona, Seville, and Valencia.
As countless cashless people were stranded far from home, those seeking hotels, taxis, and restaurants found that ATMs were down along with digital payment systems that rendered credit cards useless.
Similarly, neighborhood pharmacies and supermarkets went dark or shut down, and those that remained open couldn’t even process paper currency payments.
Hospital backup generators rationed electricity for critical areas such as surgical facilities, leaving doctors and nurses without access to patient data, also rendering support staff unable to carry out many duties due to telephone and email communication interruptions.
Many medical operations were forced to be cancelled altogether due to out-of-order elevators between floors.
Whereas no one seems to know with certainty what triggered the cascading blackout consequences, the interruption might have been caused by the failure of a complex network of interconnected lines known as “meshes” that distribute electrical flows across the grid to prevent overloads.
Perhaps it also involved disruptions of interconnections with neighboring countries’ grids which balance exported and imported generation and demand.
Maybe it had much to do with excessive dependence on intermittent wind power and overreliance on massive synchronous fossil energy-driven turbines that must constantly speed up or slow down as “spinning reserve” shock absorbers to accommodate fluctuations and prevent grid overloads.
University of León professor Miguel de Simón Martín observes that the Spanish peninsular power grid has historically been robust and reliable thanks to its high degree of meshing as well as its large synchronous generation capacity, with its weakest international point conditioned by the Pyrenees Mountain barrier.
Meanwhile, the electrical back and forth energy exchange capacity between Spain and the rest of Europe is quite small, representing a mere three percent of the country’s installed capacity compared with the E.U.’s 15% target member state 2030 goal.
However, as noted by Wired.com, “The increasing integration of renewable energy into the Spanish system may have exacerbated the disconnection issues and subsequent need to balance the grid.”
Wired notes that renewables already account for 66% of Spain’s installed capacity— mostly wind, solar, and hydro — and have generated about 60% of the country’s electricity.
Given that the blackout occurred on a sunny day and that hydro doesn’t fluctuate with weather, any attribution leaves wind as the only likely contributing culprit.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has reportedly created a commission to investigate the blackout and while believing that renewable energy production was not to be blamed, has confirmed that his government’s authorities are looking into the possibility that it was a cyberattack on critical infrastructure.
There are many previous precedents to such suspicions.
The day before Christmas in 2015, less than two years after Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and declared it would once again become part of Mother Russia, his hackers systematically disconnected circuits, deleted backup systems, and shut down substations connected to Ukraine’s Kyiv Oblenergo master power control center.
These actions caused everything dependent on electricity to fail including communications, computers, ATMs, fuel pumps, and radiation safety monitors at the old Chernobyl nuclear plant.
Stealthily disguised to appear as a financial shakedown, banks and other critical power users were told that blocked computer data could be unlocked by paying a $300 ransom in hard-to-trace Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
Instead, as discussed in my 2020 book Cyberwarfare, the masquerade was entirely a ruse to offer the Russian government deniability cover.
And that wasn’t the first such Putin cyber sabotage ploy.
In 2008, hackers took control of government websites of the Republic of Georgia, another former Russian territory.
In addition to infiltrating President Mikheil Saakashvili’s server and defacing his picture to look like Adolf Hitler, they seized routers connecting Georgia to the internet through Russia and Turkey and shut down inbound traffic including international banking systems.
Although Russian government sources again blamed the assault on organized crime, American authorities believe it to be the work of a previously named Sixteenth Directorate, part of the infamous intelligence apparatus formerly known as the KGB, later called FAPSI.
FAPSI, or more fully titled “Service of Special Communications and Information,” runs among the largest and most effective hacker schools in the world.
Fmr. U.S. Asst. Atty. Gen. for National Security John Carlin has warned of blinking red lights when it comes to the potential for a major security-driven cyberattack on our critical infrastructure.
Adding risks and vulnerabilities are alternately blinking green energy traffic signals at very dangerous global intersections.
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