Did Unreliables KO the Spanish Grid?

Energy advocate Alex Epstein often warns that "renewable" energy sources -- which he correctly calls unreliables -- destabilize the electric grid in addition to requiring expensive redundancy (usually in the form of fossil fuel powered generating capacity).

I recalled this upon hearing about the recent blackout on the Iberian Peninsula, and wondered if Spain's reportedly heavy reliance on solar and wind power might have caused or contributed to causing the blackout.

Francis Menton of the Manhattan Contrarian considers the speculation as of yesterday -- The power's back on, but the cause is still undetermined -- and considers how unreliables might have destabilized and crashed the Spanish grid. Supporting this possibility, he cites the Daily Mail:

[S]ome analysts have suggested that the Spanish grid operator's reliance on renewable energy sources to supply the majority of the nation's electricity could have led to the blackout. Traditional generators, like coal and hydroelectric plants or gas turbines, are connected directly to the grid via heavy spinning machines. When turned on, these massive machines are in constant motion and the inertia created by their weight and momentum acts like a shock absorber, helping to insulate the grid against a sudden disturbance - for example, in the event of a transmission failure. Solar and wind power do not provide the natural inertia generated by these so-called 'spinning machines', leaving the grid more vulnerable to disruptions and subsequent oscillations in the electrical frequency. [bold added]

I am hardly an expert on the grid, but this sounds plausible to me, and I'd have just about bet money on it yesterday, after hearing something to the effect that Spain was running on 100% "renewable" electricity.

But that seems not to have been the case. Menton quotes another source:

Spain has one of Europe's highest proportions of renewable energy, providing about 56pc of the nation's electricity. More than half of its renewables comes from wind with the rest from solar and other sources. That means Spain's electricity supplies are increasingly reliant on the weather delivering enough wind to balance its grid. For much of the last 24 hours, that wind has been largely missing. The website Windy.com, for example, shows wind speeds of 2-3mph, leaving the country reliant on solar energy and old gas-fired power stations. [bold added]

So Spain had more of this damping ability (from the gas-fired stations) than I thought at first. Still, was that capacity enough?

It will be interesting to see what the investigation turns up. Menton goes into more detail there, and notes that much more of Europe had been on the verge of a blackout than just Spain and Portugal.

-- CAV