Free Republic

"Spain's power grid ran entirely on renewable energy".. Spain was supposed to be Europe’s Green Energy success story. With massive amounts of renewables in the power grid, Spain was going to save the planet. Here’s Red Electrica, Spain’s state-owned power company, last year bragging about its renewables. “Renewable energies generated 56% of Spain’s electricity mix in 2024 Renewable generation increased by almost 11% in a record-breaking year on two fronts: achieving the highest renewable electricity generation ever recorded and capturing its largest share since records began.” Now, Red Electrica is trying to explain why all the lights went out. Spain...

Ontario’s premier, the leader of Canada’s most populous province, is now charging 25% more for electricity shipped to 1.5 million American homes and businesses in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff plan. Ontario's premier, the leader of Canada’s most populous province, announced that effective Monday it is charging 25% more for electricity to 1.5 million American homes and businesses in response to U.S. President Donald Trump's trade war. Ontario provides electricity to Minnesota, New York and Michigan. I will not hesitate to increase this charge. If the United States escalates, I will not hesitate to shut the electricity off...

Puerto Rico woke up in darkness on Tuesday morning after a power grid failure left nearly all of the island without electricity. Around 90% of clients were without power at 9:30 a.m. (1330 GMT), according to energy distribution company Luma Energy's real-time portal. It will likely take 24 to 48 hours to turn the lights back on, "conditions permitting," Luma said in a statement. "While the cause of the outage is under investigation, preliminary findings point to a failure in an underground line," Luma added. Ivan Baez, a spokesperson for power generator Genera, called the grid failure a "major incident"...

In 2018, the city council of Broken Hill in New South Wales, Australia, had hoped to become the country’s first carbon-free city by 2030. About $415 million USD was invested in solar, wind and battery projects within 15 miles of the town of 19,000. These generators were supposed to supply enough electricity to power 117,000 homes. Then in October, a storm hit the region, destroying power lines connecting the town to dispatchable power from the New South Wales grid, and the entire town was plunged into rolling blackouts. While things gradually returned to normal over a few weeks, the region...

Hundreds of millions of Americans risk experiencing power shortages this winter if weather conditions are harsh, according to a new report published by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), a power grid watchdog. Nearly all residents of the Northeast, Texas and Midwest could face energy shortfalls in the event of a colder-than-usual winter, the NERC report states. The lack of grid reliability is driven largely by growing electricity demand as well as the replacement of coal-fired and older natural gas-fired generators with energy-limited resources such as solar power. ... “Foreseeable extreme cold temperatures have the potential to push the...

Skyler Philippi, 24, of Columbia, Tennessee, was arrested by federal agents and charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and attempting to destroy an energy facility. “As charged, Skyler Philippi believed he was moments away from launching an attack on a Nashville energy facility to further his violent white supremacist ideology – but the FBI had already compromised his plot,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “This case serves as yet another warning to those seeking to sow violence and chaos in the name of hatred by attacking our country’s critical infrastructure: the Justice Department will find...

About 13,000 customers in Northern California woke up without electricity Friday after Pacific Gas and Electric shut off power to prevent its equipment from sparking wildfires amid dry weather and strong winds expected to last through part of the weekend. . . . Targeted power shutoffs were also possible in Southern California, where another notorious weather phenomenon, the Santa Ana winds, are expected Friday and Saturday.

Once a huge champion of all things digital, I’ve come to develop serious doubts about the pace at which humanity made the switch from analog to the cloud. The hackings, outages, data breaches, and extended breakages all make the point. But the danger is even greater. Most of the things we use today have not been stress tested. They are centralized and have a single point of failure. And they are very vulnerable. It could all stop in an instant with no sure guarantee of when it will come back. A turning point came for me recently, while visiting a...

Datacenters coming online in the next 15 months will need to supply at least some of their own powerUpdated As the saying goes, everything is bigger in Texas, but as datacenter footprints explode amid the AI boom, regulators fear even the Lone Star state's utilities won't be able to keep up for much longer. The Texas' Public Utility Commission is now warning datacenter operators looking to set up shop in the US state within the next 12 to 15 months that they won't be able to rely entirely on the local grid and will have to supply at least some...

In a move that could signal the beginning of the end for the expensive and unreliable Biden-Harris green energy ideology, 14 of the world's biggest banks have announced they are lining up behind President Donald Trump's plans for nuclear energy in the world's future. Online reporting cited documentation of the plans by the Financial Times: The statement said, "Banks and funds totaling $14 TRILLION in assets have just signed an unprecedented statement in support of nuclear power. They'll be presenting the pledge to support the goal of tripling nuclear THIS MORNING at the Rockefeller Center in New York City to...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky offered an alarming update on nationwide Russian bombings of his country on Monday, describing blackouts “everywhere” and significant harm to Ukraine’s power grid. The Russian military launched a sweeping drone and missile campaign on Monday in which it reportedly focused on bombing energy infrastructure. Some Russian media reported that the strikes impacted at least nine regions of Ukraine – including the capital, Kyiv – while Ukrainian state media listed at least “15 regions” suffering various negative effects from the “large-scale Russian attack” out of the nation’s 27. The attack is the largest Russian operation within Ukraine...

(The Center Square) — Pennsylvania’s energy future hangs in the balance amid a federal pause on liquified natural gas production, leaving taxpayers on the hook for more costly and less reliable power. At least, so say the critics of President Joe Biden’s decision to temporarily block LNG exports – which they say has a particularly devastating impact in the commonwealth. “We have to put our natural gas to work,” Robert Bair, president of the Pennsylvania State Building and Construction Trades said during a House Republican Policy Committee hearing on Monday. If Pennsylvania doesn’t do the work, he argued, that other...

Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid. In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent...

Imagine a world where you couldn’t call or text anyone, you couldn’t put gas in your car, you could pay for things, and there was no tap in your water. A nightmare, right? ... Hollywood actor Dennis Quaid is warning that such a scenario isn’t a foreign possibility. During an interview with Tucker Carlson, Quaid highlighted the dangers of a solar storm that could kill more than 90 percent of the population within a year. “Basically, there is a 100 percent probability that our sun, generating what they call a GMD, which is a solar storm, that hits hard, hits...

Albertans were asked for the second evening in a row on Saturday to limit their electricity usage to essential needs only. According to an alert issued by the Alberta Emergency Management Agency to all cell phones shortly before 7 p.m., a high demand for power during the extreme cold placed the province at a "high risk" of rotating power outages. "On top of high demand of our own energy generation, Alberta's grid receives electricity from neighboring provinces. Extreme weather in Saskatchewan and British Columbia is impacting electricity sharing, which is also a contributing factor to tonight's grid alert," Nathan Neudorf,...

More than half of the U.S. and parts of Canada, home to around 180 million people, could fall short of electricity during extreme cold again this winter due to lacking natural gas infrastructure, the North American Electric Reliability Corp (NERC) said on Wednesday. In its 2023-24 winter outlook, the regulatory authority warned that prolonged, wide-area cold snaps threaten the reliability of bulk power generation and availability of fuel supplies for natural gas-fired generation. “Recent extreme cold weather events have shown that energy delivery disruptions can have devastating consequences for electric and gas consumers in impacted areas,” NERC said.

Ford's EV business posted a big loss for the third quarter.. The strike against Ford may be over, but the company's electric vehicle woes are far from solved. The entire auto industry, grappling with steadily softening EV demand over cost and existential infrastructure challenges, is beginning to pull back its efforts to grow the sector. Tesla (TSLA) - Get Free Report, of course, is dealing with falling sales figures and gross margins amid an ongoing price war whose aim is to entice customers to go electric. General Motors (GM) - Get Free Report, still locked in the throes of the...

It's one thing to try and replace fossil fuels with wind and solar power, but experts are saying the generation of power is only half the battle, and that the problems in getting that power to Americans may be insurmountable. A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) concludes that the size of the global electricity grid will need to double by 2040, in order to reach global emission reductions targets in line with the Paris Agreement. That means, the IEA says, the world will need to refurbish or add 50 million miles of new transmission lines within 17...

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm gave Americans an unintended glimpse of the future during her road trip this summer touting the wonders of electric vehicles. Far from spotlighting the promise of EVs, her public relations misadventure in Georgia involved one of her staff in a gasoline-powered vehicle blocking off a coveted charger in advance of her arrival, leading to frayed tempers and a local EV owner calling the cops. It was an illustration of the challenges drivers could face as governments push the public to embrace plug-in vehicles. Hyped as technological marvels, EVs are boobytrapped with a host of inconveniences...

The effort to electrify America's most popular and influential vehicle class is under way, but it appears to be faltering at the hands of reluctant motorists. This week, Ford said it would lay off about 700 workers at the Detroit plant that manufactures its electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck and GM pushed back production of the Chevrolet Silverado EV, citing slowing demand. And Tesla CEO Elon Musk told investors during an earnings call on Wednesday, 'we dug our own grave' when referencing the company's much anticipated electric pickup Cybertruck. Pickup trucks have long been the crown jewel of the US...