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Spinning turbines have it, but solar panels don’t.
Spain and Portugal are still recovering from Monday’s region-wide blackout. The cause remains unknown, but already a debate has broken out over whether grids like Spain’s, which has a well-above-average proportion of renewables, are more at risk of large-scale disruptions.
At the time of the blackout, Spain’s grid had little “inertia,” which renewables opponents have seized on as a reason to blame carbon-free electricity for the breakdown. If the electricity system as a whole is a dance of electrons choreographed by the laws of electromagnetism, then inertia is the system’s brute force Newtonian backup. In a fossil fuel-powered grid, inertia comes from spinning metal — think a gas turbine — and it can give the whole system a little extra boost if another generator drops off the grid.
Solar panels, however, don’t spin. Instead, they produce direct current that needs to be converted by an inverter into alternating current at the grid’s frequency.
“If a power plant goes out, that frequency starts to drop a little bit because there’s an imbalance in the power between supply and demand, and inertia provides a little bit of extra power,” Bri-Mathias Hodge, an electrical and energy engineering professor at the University of Colorado and a former chief scientist at the nearby National Renewable Energy Laboratory, explained to me. Inertia, he said, “just gives a little bit more wiggle room in the system, so that if there are big changes, you can sort of ride through them.”
Of course, blackouts happen on grids dominated by fossil fuels — the 2003 Northeast Blackout in the U.S and Canada, for example, which plunged several states and tens of millions of people into darkness. Even on renewable-heavy grids, blackouts can still come down to failures of fossil fuel systems, as with Texas’ Winter Storm Uri in 2021, when the natural gas distribution system froze up. Much of the state had no electricity for several days amidst freezing temperatures, and over 200 people died.
But Bloomberg’s Javier Blas was nevertheless fair to the Iberian blackout when he bestowed on it the sobriquet, “The first big blackout of the green electricity era.”
Spain has been especially aggressive in decarbonizing its power grid and there’s some initial evidence that the first generators to turn off were solar power. “We started to see oscillations between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of the European power grid, and this generally means that there’s a power imbalance — somebody’s trying to export power that they can’t, or import power that they can’t because of the limits on the lines,” Hodge told me. “The reason why people have gone on to say that this is a solar issue is because where they’ve seen some of those oscillations and where they saw some of the events starting, there are a couple large solar plants in that part of southwestern Spain.”
While Spanish grid and government officials will likely take months to investigate the failure, we already know that Spain and Portugal are relatively isolated from the rest of the European grid and rely heavily on renewables, especially solar and wind. Portugal has in the past gone several days in a row generating 100% of its power from renewables; Spain, meanwhile, was boasting of its 100% renewable generation just weeks before the blackout.
Last week, Spanish solar produced over 20,000 megawatts of power, comprising more than 60% of the country’s resource mix. Spain’s seven remaining nuclear reactors — which still provide about a fifth of its electric power — are scheduled to shut down over the next decade (though officials have indicated they might be open to extending their life), while its minimal coal generation is scheduled to be retired this year.
“Spain and Portugal have been relatively early adopters of wind and solar power. The Iberian Peninsula is actually relatively weakly connected to the rest of Europe through France. And so that’s one of the tricky parts here — it’s not as well integrated just because of the geography,” Hodge said.
The disturbances on the grid started on the Spain-France interconnection, but a European power official told The New York Times that transmission issues typically don’t lead to cascading blackouts unless there’s some major disturbance in supply or demand as well, such as a power plant going offline.
Spain’s grid had issues before Monday’s blackout that can be fairly attributed to its reliance on renewables. It often has to curtail solar power production because the grid gets congested when particularly sunny parts of the country where there’s large amounts of solar generation are churning out power that can’t be transmitted to the rest of the country. Spain has also occasionally experienced negative prices for electricity, and is using European Investment Bank funds to help support the expansion of pumped-hydro storage in order to store power when prices go down.
On Monday afternoon, however, solar power dropped from around 18,000 megawatts to 8,000, Reuters reported. At the time the blackout began, the grid was overwhelmingly powered by renewables. Spanish grid operator Red Electrica said it was able to pinpoint two large-scale losses of solar power in the southwestern part of the country, according to Reuters.
That a renewables-heavy grid might struggle with maintaining reliability thanks to low inertia is no surprise. Researchers have been studying the issue for decades.
In Texas — which, like Spain, has a high level of renewable generation and is isolated from the greater continental grid — the energy market ERCOT has been monitoring inertia since 2013, when wind generation sometimes got to 30% of total generation, and in 2016 started real-time monitoring of inertia in its control room.
That real time monitoring is necessary because traditionally, grid inertia is just thought of as an inherent quality of the system, not something that has to be actively ensured and bolstered, Hodge said.
As renewables build up on grids, Hodge told me, operators should prepare by having their inverters be what’s known as “grid-forming” instead of “grid-following.”
“Right now, in the power system, almost all of the wind, solar, battery plants, all the inverter-based generation, they just look to the grid for a signal. If the grid is producing at 60 Hertz, then they want to produce 60 Hertz. If it’s producing at 59.9, then they try to match that,” Hodge said. This works when you have relatively low amounts of [renewable generation]. But when [renewables] start to become the majority of the generation, you need somebody else to provide that strong signal for everybody else to follow. And that’s sort of what grid-forming inverters do,” he said.
Grid-forming inverters could hold back some power from the grid to provide an inertia-like boost when needed. Right now, the only sizable grid outfitted with this technology, Hodge said, is the Hawaiian island of Kauai, which has a population of around 75,000. Spain, by contrast, is home to nearly 50 million.
The other key technology for grid-forming inverters to provide stability to a power system is batteries. “Batteries are actually the perfect solution for this because if you have a battery system there, you know most of the time it’s not producing or charging and totally full output or input. So the vast majority of time you’re going to have some room to sort of move on in either direction,” Hodge said.
But this requires both technology and market structures that incentivize and allow batteries to always be ready to provide that instantaneous response.
“The entire stability paradigm of the power grid was built around this idea of synchronous machines,” Hodge told me. “And we’re moving toward one that’s more based on the inverters, but we’re not there yet. We have to fix the car while we’re driving it. We can’t turn off the grid for a couple years and figure everything out.”
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On the budget debate, MethaneSAT’s untimely demise, and Nvidia
Current conditions: The northwestern U.S. faces “above average significant wildfire potential” for July • A month’s worth of rain fell over just 12 hours in China’s Hubei province, forcing evacuations • The top floor of the Eiffel Tower is closed today due to extreme heat.
The Senate finally passed its version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act Tuesday morning, sending the tax package back to the House in hopes of delivering it to Trump by the July 4 holiday. The excise tax on renewables that had been stuffed into the bill over the weekend was removed after Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska struck a deal with the Senate leadership designed to secure her vote. In her piece examining exactly what’s in the bill, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo explains that even without the excise tax, the bill would “gum up the works for clean energy projects across the spectrum due to new phase-out schedules for tax credits and fast-approaching deadlines to meet complex foreign sourcing rules.” Debate on the legislation begins on the House floor today. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he doesn’t like the legislation, and a handful of other Republicans have already signaled they won’t vote for it.
The Environmental Protection Agency this week sent the White House a proposal that is expected to severely weaken the federal government’s ability to rein in planet-warming pollution. Details of the proposal, titled “Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and Motor Vehicle Reconsideration,” aren’t clear yet, but EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has reportedly been urging the Trump administration to repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which explicitly identified greenhouse gases as a public health threat and gave the EPA the authority to regulate them. Striking down that finding would “free EPA from the legal obligation to regulate climate pollution from most sources, including power plants, cars and trucks, and virtually any other source,” wrote Alex Guillén at Politico. The title of the proposal suggests it aims to roll back EPA tailpipe emissions standards, as well.
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So long, MethaneSAT, we hardly knew ye. The Environmental Defense Fund said Tuesday that it had lost contact with its $88 million methane-detecting satellite, and that the spacecraft was “likely not recoverable.” The team is still trying to figure out exactly what happened. MethaneSAT launched into orbit last March and was collecting data about methane pollution from global fossil fuel infrastructure. “Thanks to MethaneSAT, we have gained critical insight about the distribution and volume of methane being released from oil and gas production areas,” EDF said. “We have also developed an unprecedented capability to interpret the measurements from space and translate them into volumes of methane released. This capacity will be valuable to other missions.“ The good news is that MethaneSAT was far from the only methane-tracking satellite in orbit.
Nvidia is backing a D.C.-based startup called Emerald AI that “enables AI data centers to flexibly adjust their power consumption from the electricity grid on demand.” Its goal is to make the grid more reliable while still meeting the growing energy demands of AI computing. The startup emerged from stealth this week with a $24.5 million seed round led by Radical Ventures and including funding from Nvidia. Emerald AI’s platform “acts as a smart mediator between the grid and a data center,” Nvidia explains. A field test of the software during a grid stress event in Phoenix, Arizona, demonstrated a 25% reduction in the energy consumption of AI workloads over three hours. “Renewable energy, which is intermittent and variable, is easier to add to a grid if that grid has lots of shock absorbers that can shift with changes in power supply,” said Ayse Coskun, Emerald AI’s chief scientist and a professor at Boston University. “Data centers can become some of those shock absorbers.”
In case you missed it: California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday rolled back the state’s landmark Environmental Quality Act. The law, which had been in place since 1970, required environmental reviews for construction projects and had become a target for those looking to alleviate the state’s housing crisis. The change “means most urban developers will no longer have to study, predict, and mitigate the ways that new housing might affect local traffic, air pollution, flora and fauna, noise levels, groundwater quality, and objects of historic or archeological significance,” explainedCal Matters. On the other hand, it could also mean that much-needed housing projects get approved more quickly.
Tesla is expected to report its Q2 deliveries today, and analysts are projecting a year-over-year drop somewhere from 11% to 13%.
Jesse teaches Rob the basics of energy, power, and what it all has to do with the grid.
What is the difference between energy and power? How does the power grid work? And what’s the difference between a megawatt and a megawatt-hour?
On this week’s episode, we answer those questions and many, many more. This is the start of a new series: Shift Key Summer School. It’s a series of introductory “lecture conversations” meant to cover the basics of energy and the power grid for listeners of every experience level and background. In less than an hour, we try to get you up to speed on how to think about energy, power, horsepower, volts, amps, and what uses (approximately) 1 watt-hour, 1 kilowatt-hour, 1 megawatt-hour, and 1 gigawatt-hour.
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: Let’s start with the joule. The joule is the SI unit for both work and energy. And the basic definition of energy is the ability to do work — not work in a job, but like work in the physics sense, meaning we are moving or displacing an object around. So a joule is defined as 1 newton-meter, among other things. It has an electrical equivalent, too. A newton is a unit of force, and force is accelerating a mass, from basic physics, over some distance in this case. So 1 meter of distance.
So we can break that down further, right? And we can describe the newton as 1 kilogram accelerated at 1 meter per second, squared. And then the work part is over a distance of one meter. So that kind of gives us a sense of something you feel. A kilogram, right, that’s 2.2 pounds. I don’t know, it’s like … I’m trying to think of something in my life that weighs a kilogram. Rob, can you think of something? A couple pounds of food, I guess. A liter of water weighs a kilogram by definition, as well. So if you’ve got like a liter bottle of soda, there’s your kilogram.
Then I want to move it over a meter. So I have a distance I’m displacing it. And then the question is, how fast do I want to do that? How quickly do I want to accelerate that movement? And that’s the acceleration part. And so from there, you kind of get a physical sense of this. If something requires more energy, if I’m moving more mass around, or if I’m moving that mass over a longer distance — 1 meter versus 100 meters versus a kilometer, right? — or if I want to accelerate that mass faster over that distance, so zero to 60 in three seconds versus zero to 60 in 10 seconds in your car, that’s going to take more energy.
Robinson Meyer: I am looking up what weighs … Oh, here we go: A 13-inch MacBook Air weighs about, a little more than a kilogram.
Jenkins: So your laptop. If you want to throw your laptop over a meter, accelerating at a pace of 1 meter per second, squared …
Meyer: That’s about a joule.
Jenkins: … that’s about a joule.
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
If the Senate reconciliation bill gets enacted as written, you’ve got about 92 days left to seal the deal.
If you were thinking about buying or leasing an electric vehicle at some point, you should probably get on it like, right now. Because while it is not guaranteed that the House will approve the budget reconciliation bill that cleared the Senate Tuesday, it is highly likely. Assuming the bill as it’s currently written becomes law, EV tax credits will be gone as of October 1.
The Senate bill guts the subsidies for consumer purchases of electric vehicles, a longstanding goal of the Trump administration. Specifically, it would scrap the 30D tax credit by September 30 of this year, a harsher cut-off than the version of the bill that passed the House, which would have axed the credit by the end of 2025 except for automakers that had sold fewer than 200,000 electric vehicles. The credit as it exists now is worth up to $7,500 for cars with an MSRP below $55,000 (and trucks and sports utility vehicles under $80,000), and, under the Inflation Reduction Act, would have lasted through the end of 2032. The Senate bill also axes the $4,000 used EV tax credit at the end of September.
“Long story short, the credits under the current legislation are only going to be on the books through the end of September,” Corey Cantor, the research director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told me. “Now is definitely a good time, if you’re interested in an EV, to look at the market.”
The Senate applied the same strict timeline to credits for clean commercial vehicles, both new and used. For home EV chargers, the tax credit will now expire at the end of June next year.
While EVs were on the road well before the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, what the new tax credit did was help build out a truly domestic electric vehicle market, Cantor said. “You have a bunch of refreshed EV models from major automakers,” Cantor told me, including “more affordable models in different segments, and many of them qualify for the credit.”
These include cars produceddomestically by Kia,Hyundai, and Chevrolet. But of course, the biggest winner from the credit is Tesla, whose Model Y was the best-selling car in the world in 2023.
Tesla shares were down over 5.5% in Tuesday afternoon trading, though not just because of Congress. JPMorgan also released an analyst report Monday arguing that the decline in sales seen in the first quarter would accelerate in the second quarter. President Trump, with whom Tesla CEO Elon Musk had an extremely public falling out last month, suggested on social media Monday night that the government efficiency department Musk himself formerly led should “take a good, hard, look” at the subsidies Musk receives across his many businesses. Trump also said that he would “take a look” at Musk’s United States citizenship in response to reporters’ questions about it.
Cantor told me that he expects a surge of consumer attention to the EV market if the bill passes in its current form. “You’ve seen more customers pull their purchase ahead” when subsidies cut-offs are imminent, he said.
But overall, the end of the subsidy is likely to reduce EV sales from their previously expected levels.
Harvard researchers have estimated that the termination of the EV tax credit “would cut the EV share of new vehicle sales in 2030 by 6.0 percentage points,” from 48% of new sales by 2030 to 42%. Combined with other Trump initiatives such as terminating the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program for publicly funded chargers (currently being litigated) and eliminating California’s waiver under the Clean Air Act that allowed it to set tighter vehicle emissions standards, the share of new car sales that are electric could fall to 32% in 2030.
But not all government support for electric vehicles will end by October 1, even if the bill gets the president’s signature in its current form.
“It’s important for consumers to know there are many states that offer subsidies, such as New York, and Colorado,” Cantor told me. That also goes for California, New Jersey, Nevada, and New Mexico. You can find the full list here.
Editor’s note: This story has been edited to include a higher cost limit for trucks and SUVs.