An interesting thing I learned from reading the article is that Spain is the 4th largest exporter of turbines behind only China, Germany, and Denmark.
Reading the other comments, it's really a shame we can't have a discussion about something happening in the world before it immediately becomes about the US, on topics that are barely relevant.
Spain is also big in the utility scale solar and storage industry with the Power Electronics company providing inverters or other components to many of the worlds largest plants.
There are multiple comments in this thread suggesting that the outage in Spain was caused by wind power.
This has also been suggested by various politicians and others in front of a microphone or a camera without any basis in fact whatsoever. There is a (by now remote) chance that indeed wind power (or renewables in general) were the primary cause but the evidence points in an entirely different direction, the lack of control authority and undampened oscillations getting out of control. In such a situation various safety protocols dictate that sections of the grid disconnect and go into island mode or switch off altogether. This to prevent damage to the grid and to all of the grid connected devices. As these outages go, I think it was handled extremely well, the main question remaining is what the root cause was and what should be done to avoid a repetition.
France was not affected and guarded the rest of Europe because the have reliable, dispatchable power.
It’s not really surprising that an electricity grid becomes fragile if you remove large rotating masses which can act as power reserves which can react to power variations immediately.
Rotating mass is a suspect in this case, not necessarily the primary one but the lack of control authority in the presence of frequency fluctuations is the exact opposite of what you are suggesting.
The European grid is stupendously reliable, far more reliable than any other power grid worldwide to the point that most houses and business do not have backup power plans (datacenters, hospitals, telcos and some others excepted). France is doing ok but do not pretend that without France this outage would have spread further. The Iberian peninsula has one of the weaker and heavier loaded grids in Western Europe, in spite of the above, they should have probably invested more into their infrastructure but Spain has a lot of other issues it needs to deal with which cost it a fortune every year in terms of crop losses, fires and floodings. Both Spain and Portugal (and to a lesser degree Italy and Greece) are in the line of fire when it comes to climate change damage.
I did not mean to suggest that the outage in Spain and Portugal were caused by wind power or just renewables.
It's more related to me in terms of when you look at the economical impact of energy, what sizes are in play. Just reading 4.6B Euro is a bit vague to understand to me, at least without having that put into perspective.
Another topic that has been surfacing every now and then is Electricity theft, partially for in-door cannabis plantation in occupied apartments. Which Endesa is valued 2B Euro per year.
Generally renewables do pose new challenges onto the grid, unfortunately conservatives/fascists are using that for FUD - making a technical conversation harder on that topic.
Even in the hypothetical scenario that renewable energy being more expensive than fossil energy (in production), the climate catastrophe and the impact of that on the economy is undeniable magnitudes bigger than any investment we could currently do to shift quicker stronger to renewable resources.
The US has become a nation that values persuasion over reality. It values the propaganda over truth.
The US was the envy of Europe with the IRA, which started to establish a huge manufacturing base for solar, batteries, etc., that would power cheap energy for the rest of the century for the US. The EU couldn't pull it together because they have only sticks, whereas the US could use carrots to cause massive investment. And it worked! We were building so many factories, mostly in highly Republican rural areas, because that's where there's a lot of people looking for manufacturing jobs. But the factories that were built, that raised wages for entire communities, they couldn't even say that it was for renewable energy, that it was a benefit of the IRA, because the propaganda is so thick that it would poison the jobs. And now, all that's going away. All the lead. All so that we can steal nasty heavy sour crude from a South American country that US oil producers don't even want.
With the Greenland invasion insanity, Europe is finally getting a small taste of what it's like to be a normal person living in the US the past decade. Fantasy, vibes, and really bad values have taken over the semblance of sanity.
The US is missing out on the biggest technological transition of the century, far bigger than AI, because the masses have been negatively polarized against cheaper energy bills through misinformation.
all i can say as a citizen of this country is that it will continue to do whatever it wants until there are consequences. everyone needs to recognize that.
> “Just about all the windmills are made in China,” Trump said. “They make them and sell them to suckers like Europe and suckers like the United States before."
> “All you have to do is say to China: 'How many windmill areas do you have in China?' So far they're not able to find any," he said. "They use coal and they use oil and gas and some nuclear, not much, but they don't have windmills."
It then goes on to cite data from the US Department of Energy showing how wrong Trump is.
Compared to solar, they are kind of noisy though. If you are used to not hearing the constant traffic "rumble" that exists almost everywhere, they add quite a lot of "rumble" themselves.
Are they? I haven't noticed the sound myself, although I don't live next to windmills and just travel in areas with wind power from time to time... I also grew up next to train tracks and now live next to an interstate near an airport so may have a high tolerance for background noise!
There is one turbine near where I live in Scandinavia that is very noisy. It is a low thumping sound that penetrates houses and is horrid. Those living within a km perhaps more won a court case to remove it but the owner has appealed and appealed and during the years or appeals the thing keeps turning and keeps being noisy so people can’t sleep. My understanding is the simulation and calculations of the noise that were part of the planning process were flawed and did not accurately model the terrain.
Meanwhile, not 5 km away, there are a bunch of turbines with people living around them and no problem.
So the exact slopes etc of the terrain is very important.
That sounds very much like either tower thump or a broken bearing, I think the neighbors would have a better case if they pushed the safety angle because a turbine in a bad state of maintenance is dangerous.
Then they'll be forced to fix it and it will be quiet again. You can ask them if it always was that noisy, if it wasn't then that's an extra arrow in their quiver. I'm very much pro renewables but safety is a major concern and operators that do not work safely and/or ignore valid complaints are a net negative for renewables.
Did those savings actually trickle to end costumer bills? I often read how renewables are making electricity cheaper but I only pay more and more despite the share of them increasing here in electricity generation.
Well we can see how much we would even expect this to matter.
For example take the 2024 Financial Report of Hydro One (distributor for Ontario) [0].
Apparently they earned 8,484M in revenue, and spent 4,143M in Power, and Net Income was 1,156M. Putting these together you can sort of conclude that the price of the electricity is around 1/2 their expenses.
If I then go to Ontario Power Generation financial reports 2024 [1], Revenue was apparently 7,187M, with Fuel Costing 1,049M, and net income around 1,006M. This sort of tells you that the price of fuel is only around 1/6th of their expenses.
I spent some time thinking about this and I'm not sure what to conclude other than probably a lot of what you pay is just paying for staff and maintenance and so even if fuel was free where I live it would be like a 1/12th change. Assuming the big savings in Wind are supposed to be from not having to pay for Fuel.
> The sector contributed 0.25% to GDP and enabled savings on consumers' electricity bills of more than 4.6 billion euros in 2024, with an average reduction in the wholesale price of close to 20 euros per MWh.
This is the right move. The marginal price is the price that balances supply and demand by definition, and this must be the case on the grid at all times, even to the last milliwatt, or you immediately get a Spain situation with cascading blackouts where huge parts of the grid go dark.
That happened once, and the causes are still unclear/ being investigated. We don't have blackouts unless extreme weather or bad grid sectors (e.g. semi abandoned rural). Also, we have marginal pricing, and we had this pricing for years before the Blackout.
And you can have other pricing schemes, for example pay-as-bid, that also balance supply and demand.
It's fascinating to see the live electricity sources with Electricity Maps.
Here is Spain: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/
Throughout the day you can clearly see how the wind and sun power starts kicking in, when it's raining hydro raises, etc.
An interesting thing I learned from reading the article is that Spain is the 4th largest exporter of turbines behind only China, Germany, and Denmark.
Reading the other comments, it's really a shame we can't have a discussion about something happening in the world before it immediately becomes about the US, on topics that are barely relevant.
Spain is also big in the utility scale solar and storage industry with the Power Electronics company providing inverters or other components to many of the worlds largest plants.
I am interested. Tell me more. Any books / articles you'd recommend ? Given that Spain made such progress, there has to be atleast an FT article.
Don Quixote.
Search for Siemens Gamesa. Siemens fused their wind power branch with them a few years prior to the pandemic and finalized the full takeover in 2022.
There are multiple comments in this thread suggesting that the outage in Spain was caused by wind power.
This has also been suggested by various politicians and others in front of a microphone or a camera without any basis in fact whatsoever. There is a (by now remote) chance that indeed wind power (or renewables in general) were the primary cause but the evidence points in an entirely different direction, the lack of control authority and undampened oscillations getting out of control. In such a situation various safety protocols dictate that sections of the grid disconnect and go into island mode or switch off altogether. This to prevent damage to the grid and to all of the grid connected devices. As these outages go, I think it was handled extremely well, the main question remaining is what the root cause was and what should be done to avoid a repetition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...
France was not affected and guarded the rest of Europe because the have reliable, dispatchable power.
It’s not really surprising that an electricity grid becomes fragile if you remove large rotating masses which can act as power reserves which can react to power variations immediately.
Rotating mass is a suspect in this case, not necessarily the primary one but the lack of control authority in the presence of frequency fluctuations is the exact opposite of what you are suggesting.
The European grid is stupendously reliable, far more reliable than any other power grid worldwide to the point that most houses and business do not have backup power plans (datacenters, hospitals, telcos and some others excepted). France is doing ok but do not pretend that without France this outage would have spread further. The Iberian peninsula has one of the weaker and heavier loaded grids in Western Europe, in spite of the above, they should have probably invested more into their infrastructure but Spain has a lot of other issues it needs to deal with which cost it a fortune every year in terms of crop losses, fires and floodings. Both Spain and Portugal (and to a lesser degree Italy and Greece) are in the line of fire when it comes to climate change damage.
I did not mean to suggest that the outage in Spain and Portugal were caused by wind power or just renewables.
It's more related to me in terms of when you look at the economical impact of energy, what sizes are in play. Just reading 4.6B Euro is a bit vague to understand to me, at least without having that put into perspective.
Another topic that has been surfacing every now and then is Electricity theft, partially for in-door cannabis plantation in occupied apartments. Which Endesa is valued 2B Euro per year.
https://www.endesa.com/en/press/press-room/news/energy-secto...
Generally renewables do pose new challenges onto the grid, unfortunately conservatives/fascists are using that for FUD - making a technical conversation harder on that topic.
https://www.brattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2025-Iber...
Even in the hypothetical scenario that renewable energy being more expensive than fossil energy (in production), the climate catastrophe and the impact of that on the economy is undeniable magnitudes bigger than any investment we could currently do to shift quicker stronger to renewable resources.
The US has become a nation that values persuasion over reality. It values the propaganda over truth.
The US was the envy of Europe with the IRA, which started to establish a huge manufacturing base for solar, batteries, etc., that would power cheap energy for the rest of the century for the US. The EU couldn't pull it together because they have only sticks, whereas the US could use carrots to cause massive investment. And it worked! We were building so many factories, mostly in highly Republican rural areas, because that's where there's a lot of people looking for manufacturing jobs. But the factories that were built, that raised wages for entire communities, they couldn't even say that it was for renewable energy, that it was a benefit of the IRA, because the propaganda is so thick that it would poison the jobs. And now, all that's going away. All the lead. All so that we can steal nasty heavy sour crude from a South American country that US oil producers don't even want.
With the Greenland invasion insanity, Europe is finally getting a small taste of what it's like to be a normal person living in the US the past decade. Fantasy, vibes, and really bad values have taken over the semblance of sanity.
The US is missing out on the biggest technological transition of the century, far bigger than AI, because the masses have been negatively polarized against cheaper energy bills through misinformation.
all i can say as a citizen of this country is that it will continue to do whatever it wants until there are consequences. everyone needs to recognize that.
There are already plenty of consequences, even if you don't see them.
even when americans are dying or suffering, as long as someone foreign isn't killing them, the consequences don't seem to matter
> The US has become a nation that values persuasion over reality. It values the propaganda over truth.
These things don’t happen overnight. That thing has been boiling for at least a decade.
As a non American, that’s evident…
It really started with Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
> The EU couldn't pull it together because they have only sticks, whereas the US could use carrots to cause massive investment.
Perhaps that's also part of the downfall: the US unlearnt the necessity to use sticks to stamp down the ugly side of capitalism.
FAFO, sadly
Without paywall: https://archive.is/lV7Ng
UK energy consumers cry
Related today:
UK secures record supply of offshore wind projects
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46614777
PG&E bills in California are also going down this year as well.
Power generation is going down, power delivery is going up. Power delivery is way more expensive than the actual electricity.
Sarcasm? Ca electricity costs 33.60 per kWh vs the US average of 17.98. Personally Ive seen my bill double in the last 10 years.
Meanwhile the administration of the US says that wind farms are "losers": https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/01/09/trump-...
From that article:
> “Just about all the windmills are made in China,” Trump said. “They make them and sell them to suckers like Europe and suckers like the United States before."
> “All you have to do is say to China: 'How many windmill areas do you have in China?' So far they're not able to find any," he said. "They use coal and they use oil and gas and some nuclear, not much, but they don't have windmills."
It then goes on to cite data from the US Department of Energy showing how wrong Trump is.
With virtually unlimited donations they are paid to say it.
Compared to solar, they are kind of noisy though. If you are used to not hearing the constant traffic "rumble" that exists almost everywhere, they add quite a lot of "rumble" themselves.
What's the closest you've lived to a windfarm?
I've lived within 500 meters of a pretty large one and the highway more than a kilometer away from where I lived was far more noisy than the turbines.
One time I drove up to the very base of a ~2MW wind turbine.
Couldn't hear anything besides the road several hundred metres away.
That isn't true. We have several turbines near us. One just across the street. Even on days without traffic noise, we can't hear them.
Which is why you put them in the sea or in places with sparse population.
Which greatly increases the cost of setting them up.
Are they? I haven't noticed the sound myself, although I don't live next to windmills and just travel in areas with wind power from time to time... I also grew up next to train tracks and now live next to an interstate near an airport so may have a high tolerance for background noise!
There is one turbine near where I live in Scandinavia that is very noisy. It is a low thumping sound that penetrates houses and is horrid. Those living within a km perhaps more won a court case to remove it but the owner has appealed and appealed and during the years or appeals the thing keeps turning and keeps being noisy so people can’t sleep. My understanding is the simulation and calculations of the noise that were part of the planning process were flawed and did not accurately model the terrain.
Meanwhile, not 5 km away, there are a bunch of turbines with people living around them and no problem.
So the exact slopes etc of the terrain is very important.
That sounds very much like either tower thump or a broken bearing, I think the neighbors would have a better case if they pushed the safety angle because a turbine in a bad state of maintenance is dangerous.
Then they'll be forced to fix it and it will be quiet again. You can ask them if it always was that noisy, if it wasn't then that's an extra arrow in their quiver. I'm very much pro renewables but safety is a major concern and operators that do not work safely and/or ignore valid complaints are a net negative for renewables.
Trump also said solar is bad.
Did those savings actually trickle to end costumer bills? I often read how renewables are making electricity cheaper but I only pay more and more despite the share of them increasing here in electricity generation.
Well we can see how much we would even expect this to matter.
For example take the 2024 Financial Report of Hydro One (distributor for Ontario) [0].
Apparently they earned 8,484M in revenue, and spent 4,143M in Power, and Net Income was 1,156M. Putting these together you can sort of conclude that the price of the electricity is around 1/2 their expenses.
If I then go to Ontario Power Generation financial reports 2024 [1], Revenue was apparently 7,187M, with Fuel Costing 1,049M, and net income around 1,006M. This sort of tells you that the price of fuel is only around 1/6th of their expenses.
I spent some time thinking about this and I'm not sure what to conclude other than probably a lot of what you pay is just paying for staff and maintenance and so even if fuel was free where I live it would be like a 1/12th change. Assuming the big savings in Wind are supposed to be from not having to pay for Fuel.
[0] https://www.hydroone.com/investorrelations/Reports/Hydro%20O...
[1] https://www.opg.com/reporting/financial-reports/
One reason cost might be going up is because the grid needs upgrades.
A house might have a typical peak power demand of 1kWH. Now? It might peak at 10. I'm making up these numbers by the way.
Everywhere that I know of, you pay for the grid through your bill.
I'm in Austria and I pay separate bills for the grid and the electricity.
second paragraph of the article starts with:
> The sector contributed 0.25% to GDP and enabled savings on consumers' electricity bills of more than 4.6 billion euros in 2024, with an average reduction in the wholesale price of close to 20 euros per MWh.
in the UK the price everyone pays is set according to the marginal price
essentially this means if there's one milliwatt of gas on the grid: everyone pays the gas price
as a result consumers see very benefit from renewables
(but the renewable generators are making out like bandits)
This is the right move. The marginal price is the price that balances supply and demand by definition, and this must be the case on the grid at all times, even to the last milliwatt, or you immediately get a Spain situation with cascading blackouts where huge parts of the grid go dark.
That happened once, and the causes are still unclear/ being investigated. We don't have blackouts unless extreme weather or bad grid sectors (e.g. semi abandoned rural). Also, we have marginal pricing, and we had this pricing for years before the Blackout.
And you can have other pricing schemes, for example pay-as-bid, that also balance supply and demand.
Yes that's sound weird but this is to make sure gas peaker plants which by definition run only a fraction of time can be profitable and be built.
yeah I understand the theory behind the system
however the market participants have "adapted" to it
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/08/two-power-s...
it works pretty well on a short-term basis but due to the way the system works there's no ability to price-in a long term signal
the government is currently consulting on a changes to introduce this mechanism (as is the EU)