April 30, 2025 - Trains froze in place. Traffic lights went dark. Elevators trapped their passengers. Refrigerators shut down.  Flights were canceled. Life ground to a halt.

A massive blackout shut down the Iberian Peninsula on Monday shortly after Spain announced that it was running on 100% "renewable" energy for the first time ever.

Michael Shellenberger wrote, "It was one of the largest peacetime blackouts Europe has ever seen. And it was not random. It was not an unforeseeable event. It was the exact failure that many of us have been, repeatedly, warning lawmakers about for years — warnings that Europe’s political leaders systematically chose to ignore."

Marc Morano posted this analysis to CFACT's Climate Depot:

"Before the outage hit, Spain was running its grid with very little of what's called 'dispatchable spinning generation,' which means power plants, like gas or nuclear, that can quickly adjust their output to keep the grid stable... Traditional plants provide this with their spinning turbines, but renewables don't, making the grid more fragile if you don't have a way to very rapidly load-balance in the case of an outage. This likely contributed to the outage that hit Spain, Portugal, and parts of France, as the grid couldn't handle sudden disruptions well."

"A reliance on net zero energy left Spain and Portugal vulnerable to the mass blackouts engulfing the region, experts said last night."

Spain's Socialist government has been letting the Greens have their way. Radicals celebrated as Spain shut down its nuclear and hydrocarbon plants, just when neighbors have been delaying and even increasing nuclear generation. 

Spain was forced to import massive amounts of electricity from nuclear-powered France and coal-and-oil-powered Morocco to get its grid back online.

Time and again Europe illustrates how not to manage our energy economy.

Fortunately, as President Trump takes stock of his first 100 days, shutting down the Left's energy mistakes has been among his finest accomplishments.

Wind and solar are not up to the task of powering our future, but they do have their moments.

A silver lining of the power outage: Spanish cafes dishing out free ice cream...before it melted.