Free Republic

The massive power outage that wreaked havoc in Europe is being blamed on a pair of likely solar plant breakdowns in southwest Spain, a report said. Red Eléctrica said it identified two power generation loss incidents in southwest Spain – likely involving solar plants – that caused instability in the Spanish power grid and contributed to a breakdown of its interconnection to France, according to Reuters. "We have never had a complete collapse of the system," Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said in a televised address Monday night. Eduardo Prieto, Red Eléctrica’s chief of operations, said the instability in the...

In a devastating blow to the Democrat’s Green New Deal agenda, the solar panel farm at Lake Placid, Florida, was ripped apart by Hurricane Milton, exposing the inherent vulnerabilities of relying on so-called “green energy.” The 380-acre Lake Placid Solar Power Plant, was meant to symbolize the future of energy, but after Hurricane Milton’s landfall, it now stands as a symbol of the failures of environmental utopianism. The 45-megawatt (MW) plant consists of approximately 180,000 tracking solar panels. This solar facility, touted for its ability to power over 12,000 homes at peak production, was ravaged by the storm’s extreme conditions....

Two months ago, 34 birds were found dead or injured on the site of the Ivanpah solar plant owned by BrightSource Energy in east San Bernardino County, California. Almost half suffered from singed feathers after running afoul of the plant’s reflected beams of sunlight, according to a report from The Desert Sun. This was not an isolated incident: another 19 were found dead at the 500-megawatt Desert Sunlight plant, which is also located in California. So what’s going on here? Why are birds dropping like their winged-brethren, flies, around these plants and what can we do? The Californian desert has...