Spanish snafu leaves nation in the dark (04-29-2025--Hour2)

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to dpeakclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. I know last hour I probably sounded a bit like an expert in Canadian politics. That was due to my crash course studying of about twenty minutes. Now I shall shift gears because I also spent about fifteen minutes this morning becoming an expert in Spanish renewable energy. Yes, so last week Spain celebrated last week, literally last week, one hund renewables for their energy system. Okay, look at us, We're one hundred percent renewable. We care more about Gaya Earth than everybody else. We are so superior. And then this week the lights went out yesterday, Actually, Spanish grid operators found themselves sprinting against sunset yesterday. Emmet Penny, writing at Compact magazine saying the entire country had blacked out, not from the siesta or the uh, well, the siesta is the nap, but from the drinking, not from that. No, literally the yeah, everything was shut down, like everything. Planes paused on the runway because there was no air traffic control, Trains lurched to a stop on the tracks or sat in their bays at the station. Within a few hours, the Spanish Spanish government had declared a national emergency. The blackouts went into France and Portugal. Europe is learning another painful lesson about its power sector. If one nation mismanages its grid, its neighbors suffer along with it. If these blackouts were caused by Spain's green energy policies, as seems likely, these blackouts are a preview of the world to come. I gotta tell you, I am as surprised as anybody else that de industrialization might have some negative effects. It's amazing. Yeah, turning off a stable and efficient energy production system in lieu of an intermittent, unstable one. It has a downside. Did you know this? I'm not sure everybody really understood what the downsides here might be. If only anybody had warned the Spanish before relying on wind and solar and water. They do have some hydroelectric, but they're connected into other countries' energy grid. And if France, I mean France, they're like running a lot, they run a lot of nuclear I gotta believe at some point, like all of Europe is going to be dependent on the French. I know how that sounds. I'm just saying I think they're going to be dependent on the French, at least for the nuclear power. I don't see that as a strategy for you know, national strength. When you turn over literally the lifeblood of everything energy, Nothing you have in this country or any other country works without power, right. You got to have the power. And if you outsource power generation to some other country, that's not going to make you strong. So the official explanation for the blackouts is a series of quote anomalous oscillations. Ah, yes, the old anominaloust oscillations. Excuse We've we've heard this so many time. I've never actually heard anomalous oscillations on long distance high voltage lines. This so called quote induced atmospheric variation. Induced atmospheric variation, okay, so induced means that it was made to happen I'm guessing, well, it could be natural, it could be man made, could be technological induced. Atmospheric, So something in the air, it's happened, Something in the air was induced, some atmospheric thing occurred. I don't understand what these terms mean, and I'm sure that's by design. So they say that this induced atmospheric variation triggered synchronization failures that kicked off power disturbances across the European power system. It's hard to tell exactly what that means, as they sit somewhere between like a technical explanation and a political butt saving explanation. Right, there's a question of what happened, and then there's the question of who to blame. So in nearby Portugal, the grid operator there claims that something along one of its power lines disrupted the even flow of power between generators on its grid, which messed with the frequency, which likely tripped off more wind and solar and that caused the blackout. So there are two terms that Emmett Penny goes into here at Compact Magazine that I think are important to keep in mind. You've got dispatchable power and intermittent power. Okay, at the time of the blackout, the country had a very very small percentage of dispatchable power generation in its mix. Dispatchable means that you can switch on the sources to meet demand when you need them, things like nuclear natural gas. Right, that's dispatchable. You turn on a switch. Power now flows. The opposite of dispatchable is intermittent, like wind and solar. Spain has tons of those. They make up about eighty percent of the mix just before the blackouts, well they did so when these atmospheric oscillations took place, the Spanish grid was already in a precarious spot because of its dearth or its lack of dispatchable power made it way more vulnerable to the frequency disturbances. And then he goes on to describe there's an analogy. It's like you've got this rope, and you want the rope to be taught and whatever. I'm not going into all of that. All. All you got to keep in mind here is that the dispatchable resources nuclear natural gas, right, these things slowly switch off when they trip. So if there's like a power surge or something whatever, they go offline, right, They slowly turn down, which means you have time to recuperate things start right, so things are slowing down. When a renewable trips, it's a boop. It's off right out, and then you end up with a cascading failure. We learned this when they were trying to turn back on the power station that got shot up. Remember a couple of those instants. Whatever happened, by the way, Hey, they ever catch any of those? No? I guess not. Anyway, we learned this after the attacks on the power stations in America, is that once these things go offline, you now have to kind of turn them back on and give them enough time to get all the way up and running, because if you turn the whole system on all at once, it overloads because it takes more power to start back up. Thanks to overreliance on wind and solar, Restarting the Spanish grid is going to take far longer than it normally would because it lacks a robust fleet of dispatchable plants to help with restoring the power, and what we're seeing stems directly from policy decisions. The Associated Press called it an unprecedented blackout that brought much of Spain and Portugal to a complete standstill. Yesterday, eleven hours after the nation ground to a halt. Government experts were still trying to figure out what the hell happened. The Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said, we have never had a complete collapse of the system. They lost sixty percent of the national demand in a matter of five seconds. That is nuts. It was the second serious European power outage in less than six weeks. You'll recall March twentieth, a fire shut down Heathrow Airport in the UK, and it came as authorities across Europe's grid gird against sabotage back by Russia. Here's a great idea. 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By the way, those eruptions are like you know, nuclear bombs going off like on the order of you know, a bazillion bombs at the same time, and so it sends out these EMPs, and if the solar flares or CMEs are big enough, they actually can disturb the electronics on Earth. So that might have been it. I doubt it because it was only isolated to the Spanish grid and it doesn't appear that stuff has been fried there. But they're still investigating. And no, I remember last week we talked about this insane British idea. No, no, no, not to like taking like a healthy approach to dental work. It's not at all, no, this insane idea they were going to block out the sun. They're going to try to block out the sun, which was like the big story there is that the British think that they've got too much sun breaking through to their island, which is bizarre if you've ever been there, like you don't see the sun. So maybe they got maybe they I don't know, got moving on their experiment and they blocked out the sun and Tchart all of the Spanish solar panels. I don't know. Jay says. In the Navy we called anything this technical FM freaking magic that's cleaned up for FCC purposes. And James says it is a seldom reported fact that the second most common reason for divorce in Spain is induced atmospheric variation. That was not aware of that. The number one reason is apparently unfaithful bullfighters. James with the rare double rim shot. Okay, so they have never had a complete collapse of their system, according to the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. The Portuguese National Cybersecurity Center, in a statement, said there was no sign that the outage was due to a cyber attack at this time. Outage across the Iberian Peninsula, combined population of about sixteen million people now, the Spanish Canary Islands where all of the birds are from, uh and the Bellaric Islands, and the territories of Kuta and Melilla located across the Mediterranean in Africa. None of those were affected, so the islands not affected. After an extraordinary meeting of the National Security Council. Sanchez said that the army would distribute generators and other material to the hardest hit areas of Tuesday or on Tuesday. So you're sending out generators. Don't those things run on fossil fuel? Why do you hate Mother Earth? Electricity was being pulled from Morocco and France to restore power to southern and northern Spain. Spain's Prime minister thanked the foreign governments for helping out. Spain was also increasing the reduction from hydroelectric and combined cycle thermal power plants. Try to ramp up as best they can, but those are intermittent, not dispatchable, hence the problem. Guys, I really do feel like I feel like a lot of people are missing the boat on this whole nuclear thing. All right, if you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events, and I know you do too. And you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why, Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app and it's a website, and it combines news from around the world in one place so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself check dot ground, dot news slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. Just hear me out on this whole nuclear thing. I know it's pretty new. Not a lot of people have even heard about this technology, but from what I understand, it's really reliable and it makes a metric crapload of energy that is the official unit of measurement. Okay, it makes a lot of it, and it's steady, constant. Doesn't matter if the sun is out, sun is not out, doesn't matter if the wind is blowing or not blowing, doesn't matter. It's just constant and it doesn't and create all of the CO two gas that the trees and plants love so much, So we get to starve the vegetation too, which I think is the real goal of the Earth first people. In fact, there are next gen nuclear reactors. There is apparently a whole earlier generation, maybe a couple of them. I don't know. But again a lot of people have never even heard about this form of energy production called nuclear. A manufacturing plant in Texas plans to power its production with an advanced nuclear reactor instead of natural gas. This is part of the Trump administration's push to unleash commercial nuclear power in America. When completed, the nation's first grid scale advanced nuclear reactor will power a forty seven one hundred acre facility that makes plastics and other materials used in dozens of products, unless, of course, we can't get all the raw materials because of the TERFs. But we shall say Dow Chemical and the nuclear energy engineering Firm X Energy. I don't believe that's related to Elon. Musk submitted a construction permit earlier this month to the federal government for a small modular reactor what they call SMRs. This would be at Dow's Dow Chemicals Sea Drift, Texas manufacturing site. The reactor will replace an aging natural gas plant and eliminate nearly all greenhouse gas emissions, which again, the plants in the trees and the shrubs love, so we want to starve them of the CO two. The permit is the first step in an anticipated resurgence in new clear power. Mister Trump initiated the nuclear power come back during his first administration, and nuclear is now set to skyrocket as the President seeks to rebuild the US manufacturing base and establish the nation as a global leader in artificial intelligence. Oh yeah, that's right. AI requires once again, a metric crap ton of power. Needs a lot of power to run these AI systems. So if you're not making power, and you're not doing it cost effectively and efficiently, you're not going to be in the AI game. The problem, as I see it, is going to be getting the approvals in anything under like thirty years. Let's go over to the phones here Chet with Matt. Hello, Matt, welcome to the show. Pick calling. I haven't talked to you in a while. How you doing, But I'm doing all right, sir. Welcome back, Yeah, thank you, great show as usual. I called Brett winnable. Why do you want to start off like that? Why do you want to start off by making me jealous? No, this was a couple of weeks ago. He was talking about the sewage that was running up from Mexico and you know, destroyed. He was basically talking about environmental problems and disasters that are happening that are easy, you know, that can be corrected. But anyway, I called him up and I explained to him, I mean he and I are roughly the same age. And nineteen seventy nine, when Three Mile Island was going on, I lived right outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which was you know, it is maybe thirty five forty miles down when from Three Mile Island, and you know, everybody was nervous and we didn't know what was going on. And you know what I mean, yeah, nuclear powers and the safety regulations and everything have come a long way in the last it was that forty five years. Ago, right, and for folks who aren't to wear three Mile Island, I think it wiped out like three states, right, I mean it just killed millions of people. No, no, but that was the rumor. But no, no, but like what happened is over in Europe. You know that energy is not reliable. The wind doesn't always blow, the sun doesn't always shine, and there are downsides to it. Yeah, wind middles kill birds. Yeah, the ones that they put in the ocean, they mess up marine life. And you know they're saying, like out in California, within a certain relatively soon time period, you're going to have to have electric cars, electric lawnmowers, electric leaf blowers, electric everything. And they already have rolling blackouts. Where is that electricity going to come from? And I kind of agree with you that nuclear energy. There is one little downside of nuclear energy, and I don't think they know exactly what to do with the byproduct of that. They don't know where to put it or how to keep it. But that seems like maybe an easier thing to fix than all the other downsides to this. And I use sarcastic air quotes renewable energy or whatever. You know, it's just like you said, it's bulletproof, rock solid, reliable energy. It's always there, doesn't matter if the sunshine, it doesn't matter if it's nighttime, you know, and it's just I don't know. I just this was the problem. Yeah, go ahead, no, no, sir, go ahead. Well I was gonna say the one of the big problems, and I went over this a couple of weeks ago. One of the big problems is the storage of the energy produced by these intermittent renewable sources. Right. They can't they cannot figure out how to store the amount of energy over long distances. That's a big problem that they have that science just hasn't met the moment on that yet. Maybe they figure it out in a cost effective way. But I remember the data that they were running for the amount of like rare earth minerals needed to make the batteries required of a certain size to to support these systems. There aren't enough. There just aren't enough to make the batteries and the storage. Again, maybe science finds a way to address that issue regarding the waste products, like, yes, you could store them. That's kind of what's been going on with the waste material. They just you know, store them in these facilities. Uh that This was the Yucca Mountain project out in Nevada that Harry Reid killed where there's this, you know, hollowed out mountain, just store everything in the mountain. But I have seen some stories over the last year where some of the waste product they've they've actually now developed uses for some of that byproduct. So really, yeah, so like it's sort of like the the ft, I forget. Yeah, no, I forget what they were, I forget what they had found it. But the it reminded me of when I was reading it. I don't have the story with me, but when I was reading it, I was reminded of the fear mongering over population, that we're not going to be able to feed everybody, right, But what is never taken into account and those dire predictions is is ingenuity, human ingenuity that we figure out ways to grow more food on smaller pieces of land right to get bigger yields. And I don't have any doubt that the human mind and AI will probably figure it out. They'll figure out the way to repurpose those byproducts. Yeah, and like you said, with AI, that takes an enormous amount of the energy in Yeah, I have no idea what that is or even why that does that. But you know, I don't claim to be an energy expert or anything. I'm just wondering what's going to happen in California when they say, if there's two evs in your garage, the car is going to your house is going to use three times the amount of electricity that it currently does, and you've already got rolling blackouts going out in Cali. Yeah, what are they like? Nobody? Like the wormhole doesn't go any deeper than that. Like, you just decided everyone's going to drive an electric car and that's the end of that, right, Like, Okay, where are you getting the power from? Well? Right, because they don't because they have this idea that they can somehow or other have enough solar panels everywhere that will generate enough power all the time. And it's it's absurd. It's a utopian vision. And like all utopian visions, they never work out. So that I appreciate the call. Yeah, hey, thanks Gray show Man. Thanks sir. Take care all right, So spring is here a time of renewal and celebrations. 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Mail orders are accepted to get all the details that create a video. Dot Com Washington Times piece by Susan Ferreccio. Next gen nuclear reactors poised for surge in US power grid. Matt asked uh Or said that he wasn't clear why AI required so much power. It's because the computing is so intense. In order to generate all of this information, and pull in all of these different things that you have so many servers and everything else that it requires a lot of power to run the brains basically. Now, there was the other Remember a couple of weeks ago, there was this huge announcement some China based company was able to build an AI system that was like one thousandth of the cost and it used a mere fraction of the power because rather than having as I understood it, like you so you have the AI mission. You know, you're at your terminal and you're going to type something in. You're at your computer, you're going to type something in. And so the AI is is, you know, fully on all systems going at all times, so anybody that comes in asks anything, it immediately goes and draws in stuff. And what they figured out was don't have all of the servers basically, or the different areas of expertise, like over here is your landscaping expertise, and over here is your nuclear expertise, and over here is your you know, Beyonce expertise whatever, and so you just only fire up the areas of expertise that are needed for that particular operation. And so yeah, so it's like okay, Hey, I want to talk about you know, Beyonce, and so I go over there and then that system fires up and then once it's done, it shuts itself down, and so it's a more economical use of the power. That's my understanding of the way that that other company had set up, and it was like revolutionize, it could revolutionize everything. And I think it's sent the stock price of the chip makers plummeting because you wouldn't need as much of the microprocessing power at any rate. This was a top priority for Trump to get more nuclear online. The technology has been in development for years but has never been deployed in the US. There are a handful of these SMR plants. SMR. It's where they whispered to you. No, I'm kidding. It's small modular reactors. That's ASMR. It's different. The technology has been in development here, but there are some of these plants running in Russia and China. Under Trump's pro nuclear energy policies, SMR plants are poised to advance rapidly. They are smaller than traditional water cooled nuclear power plants and can be built quicker and cheaper. SMRs can use a variety of coolants, so they do not need to be positioned near large water sources. They also produce a third of the energy of a traditional nuclear reactor. The multiple module SMRs allow the pl plants to conduct maintenance without shutting down entirely, which is required with large scale nuclear power facilities. So you can flip one off, do work on it, and the power generation continues because there's another module that's running. Big tech companies have started investing significantly in these plants, hoping that they will provide clean energy to power AI technology. Back in October, Google touted the world's first corporate agreement with Cairo's Power to deploy multiple SMRs in the US beginning in twenty thirty, so it's coming in five years. Days after that announcement, Amazon said that it would invest half a billion dollars in three SMR projects that will power its data centers and provide electricity for homes and businesses in Sea Drift, Texas at the Dow Chemical Plant. Construction of the project is expected to begin next year and could be completed by the end of the decade, which is longer than it took to build the Empire. State building. Every now and again, and this is one of those moments I lament the loss of our ability to build stuff, to build cool stuff, and to build that quickly. I was reminded of this the other day when I was in a building in uptown Charlotte and the building was built I don't know, probably sixty years ago, and it had all of this Art Deco architectural design in it, and it's like that's look, I'm not an architectural expert or anything like that, but Art Deco is cool. You know, it was cool when they first started putting it up everywhere, and it's still cool. Now. Why did we abandon I know why communists we abandoned it because of commis like why do we have to strip a well? And also the like the cost of materials and building design and regulatory regimes that eat up the profits and so they don't have the money to spend on these architectural components. But it really was this thing that was like American, you know, this Art Deco style. It was like strong and it was beautiful and kind of imposing. And I wish we would do more of that rather than just building so many of these buildings and all they are glass boxes, you know, which look that's fine in a lot of natural light. I am sure, But I'm just like, it's just one of those things, one of these architectural periods that did not last long enough for my taste, and I wish that they would still build. And it's the same thing with the nuclear reactors. Build them in the Art Deco style. You don't have to, though, that's okay, that's a terrible idea. I mean, well, maybe if you want to do Art Deco that would be kind of cool too. But why can't we build these things faster? Why can't we build really anything faster. Energy demand in the United States is forecast to increase by about sixteen percent in just four years. That's according to Grid Strategies, a clean power consulting firm, and they're looking at the highest growth in electricity in thirty to forty years. Right, the demand for power is going to be huge. It already is, and it's going to be even huger. The uptick in SMR projects follows the spectacular failure of Oregon based New Scale Powers six reactor project at the Idaho National Laboratory. Trump's first administration agreed to fund up to one point four billion dollars for the project, which by twenty twenty nine was supposed to be generating enough electricity to power three hundred thousand homes. The Biden administration also funded the development of the plant, but it was canceled in late twenty twenty three because of cost overruns and too few subscriptions from area power providers who were wary of the untested SMR technology. Trump administration plans to clear a regulatory path for its advancement, and basically they're saying the industry is saying, if you get the first ones built and demonstrated, confidence increases, and then demand we'll take off. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.