Is The New York Times Serious With This Headline About the Spanish Blackout?

Spain made a huge announcement this year: it is now 100 percent powered by renewable energy. Green warriors unite! The planet is saved. Global warming is over, except that it’s not. And like Solyndra, this entire method of powering a nation was exposed as a fraud and a scam. There was an 18-hour blackout because the grid couldn’t handle it. The best part is that The New York Times had this headline for the fiasco: “How Spain’s Success in Renewable Energy May Have Left It Vulnerable.”

Fact check: If the grid goes down, or is “vulnerable,” then the renewable energy push was not a success:

Spain's power company, Red Eléctrica, proudly declared on April 16 that enough renewable energy had been generated to cover demand. “The ecological transition is moving forward,” it said.
Less than two weeks later, Spain and Portugal experienced an 18-hour blackout that disrupted daily life, shutting down businesses and schools and crippling trains and mobile networks.
Officials have given few details on the cause of the outage. But the incident exposed how Spain and Portugal, promoted as success stories in Europe’s renewable energy transition, are also uniquely vulnerable to outages, given their relative isolation from the rest of the continent’s energy supply.
“This disruption serves as a clear warning,” wrote Pratheeksha Ramdas, an analyst at Rystad Energy, a consulting firm. “Future grid failures could have even more severe consequences,” she added.
The widespread outage raises questions about the resilience of the power infrastructure in Spain and Portugal — and to an extent, Europe. The two countries have invested heavily in building renewable energy sources like wind turbines and solar farms.
More than half of Spain’s electricity came from renewable energy as of last year, up from about a quarter 15 years ago. That rapid increase has put Spain at the forefront of Europe’s transition to renewable energy and led to much lower electricity prices and less reliance on fossil fuels.
This shift, though, may also have made the grid more prone to the sort of disruption that occurred on Monday. “When you have more renewables on the grid,” Ms. Ramdas said, “then your grid is more sensitive for these kind of disturbances.”

Reuters: "Don’t blame renewables for Spain’s power outage"

The 2nd sentence: "the issue appears to be the management of renewables in the modern grid."

This is why no one trusts the media. The headline is completely undermined by the 2nd sentence.

What ridiculous language… pic.twitter.com/xTBAIZbn9t
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) April 30, 2025

For those keeping score at home:

April 22nd: Spain brags about hitting 100% renewable power.

April 28th: Spain has the nation's largest blackout in history. pic.twitter.com/S6wsaHEePK
— Will Hild (@WillHild) April 28, 2025