Tag: spain

Spain Blackouts Prompt EU Push for More Censorship Under “Preparedness Strategy” Citing “Disinformation” Threats

These days, no event, incident, or occasion, regardless of its nature, appears to be too big or too small to use as an excuse to promote more censorship in the name of “combating disinformation.”

Last week, Spain and Portugal lived through an embarrassing episode of widespread electricity blackouts – and the current consensus is that the reason is even more embarrassing: old infrastructure, fraught with its own problems – that are only compounded by endless attempts to work “green” energy sources into it.

Trillions of dollars is the figure that experts are mentioning as needed to get the EU’s electricity grid up to speed – or rather, balance the reality with the aggressive “progressive” policy pushes so that a similar crisis is averted going forward.

But a conversation about these topics is apparently a hard one to have for the EU bureaucracy.

Instead, it, through the mouth of Commissioner for Preparedness, Crisis Management and Equality Hadja Lahbib, prefers to effectively misguide, and deflect away from that, and onto the key talking points that are sure to provoke a sense of paranoia among citizens: cyberattacks and supply chain disruptions (as a result of this type of threats).

In other words – instead of addressing actual problem(s), the focus is being shifted to how information around them should be best managed, to somehow score public opinion points.

Speaking for Spain’s El Mundo, Lahbib mentioned the EU Preparation Strategy, and the Union Strategy for Preparation – apparently, her “shorthand” for the formal, and oddly phrased, “EU Preparedness Union Strategy.”

It is a set of measures meant to “counter foreign information manipulation and disinformation more systematically” by fully using the EU’s Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) toolbox, the censorship law Digital Services Act (DSA), and the censorship initiative – the upcoming European Democracy Shield.

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Spain hit by more blackouts as ‘tens of thousands’ left without power in Canary Islands a week after nationwide outages

A power outage hit several areas of the Spanish island of La Palma in the Canary Islands on Thursday, just a week after national outages.

Local media reported that thousands of locals and holidaymakers across the island were left without power for nearly two hours after a blackout occurred at around 10am local time.

The affected areas included Los Llanos de Aridane, Breña Alta, Santa Cruz de La Palma and Fuencaliente.

More than twenty towns were left without in the dark in these areas, stretching from north to south of the island, before Endesa and Red Eléctrica begun working on restoring power.

Javier Llamas, the mayor of the town of Aridane, told a local radio station at around midday that: ‘More than half of the power outage has already been restored.’    

Local media reports explained how the power outage could potentially affect up to 30,000 people in La Palma.

‘The source is unknown for now, but everything points to a problem at the Los Guinchos power plant,’ La Radio Canaria said.

La Palma Island Council urged residents to remain calm, avoid overwhelming emergency services, call 112 only if absolutely necessary, and prioritise saving battery life on mobile devices. 

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Three children ‘rescued’ from home after ‘COVID syndrome’ parents kept them locked inside for 4 years

Three children have allegedly been found living in prison-like conditions following COVID ‘lockdown’ rules, long after pandemic restrictions ended.

A German couple living in Spain have been arrested after allegedly locking their three children inside and forcing them to abide by pandemic restrictions, such as wearing masks, for the past four years.

The siblings, eight-year-old twins and a 10-year-old, were dramatically rescued from the ‘house of horrors’ in Oviedo on Monday (April 28) after being locked up inside since around December 2021.

Once freed, cops noticed the children acted unusually to being outside, as they touched the grass and appeared intrigued by a snail.

An investigator also said: “As soon as we got them out, all three children began to breathe deeply, as if they had never been outside before,” according to New York Post.

The authorities learnt of the children’s situation after a neighbor filed a complaint on April 14 that the youngsters had not been attending school, according to El Comercio.

Yet while Oviedo Police Chief Javier Lozano said there was nothing ‘initially’ that sparked concern, cops grew suspicious after surveillance on the home revealed the 53-year-old father was the only person to leave the residence to pick up groceries and mail.

Other neighbors reported the rest of the family had not left the home since December 2021.

When police approached the family, the father reportedly ‘agreed’ to let them in while they spotted the mom, a 48-year-old German-American woman, putting three masks each on the children, per El Mundo.

It is also reported that she told officers to ‘be careful’ since her children were ‘very sick.’

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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.” 

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NatGas Generators Rescued Spain From Net Zero Death After Power Collapse

We want to congratulate Portugal and Spain for achieving net zero earlier this week, well ahead of the 2050 target.

Europe’s dangerous and radical shift to unreliable net zero energy has been nothing short of a disaster and an embarrassment for the far-left liberals high in their castles in Brussels. 

The progressives ramming green ideology down our throats seem completely divorced from reality, having steered the West toward a bleak future built on unreliable green energy—much of it sourced from China.

Meanwhile, China is rapidly expanding its reliable coal and nuclear power generation. One can’t help but wonder whether leftist politicians are inadvertently sabotaging the very foundations of the West. 

The inconvenient truth for Western liberals is that fossil fuel power generation is what restarted Spain’s power grid after the worst power blackout in a generation. 

“SPAIN’s black start after the cascading power failure relied heavily on gas-fired and hydro generators to re-energise the grid and establish synchronism,” commodities analyst John Kemp wrote on X. 

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Power Restored In Spain, Portugal As Net-Zero Becomes Headache For Brussels

Spanish power distributor Red Eléctrica announced on X early Tuesday that 99% of the country’s power capacity had been restored following a daylong, unprecedented blackout that plunged much of Europe’s Iberian Peninsula into chaos and darkness.

As of 0700 local time, Red Eléctrica stated:

  • 99.95% of the demand recovered (25,794MW).
  • We continue working from the Electrical Control Center for the complete normalization of the system.

The outage paralyzed digital payment systems, disrupted communications, and brought various modes of transportation networks to an apocalyptic standstill. While a Spanish judge has launched an investigation into whether a cyberattack was responsible, early indications suggest the culprit is likely net zero.

Here’s an excerpt from Michael Shellenberger at PUBLIC, who provided an uncomfortable truth about the unhinged liberals in Europe who have been hellbent on retiring fossil fuel power and nuclear generation plants, swapping for unreliable solar and wind:

Despite all these warnings, political and regulatory energy in Europe remained focused on accelerating renewable deployment, not upgrading the grid’s basic stability. In Spain, solar generation continued to climb rapidly through 2023 and early 2024. 

Coal plants closed. Nuclear units retired. 

On many spring days by 2025, Spain’s midday solar generation exceeded its total afternoon demand, leading to frequent negative electricity prices.

The system was being pushed to the limit.

And today, at 12:35 pm, it broke.

…

Spain’s blackout wasn’t just a technical failure. It was a political and strategic failure.

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Spain’s blackouts are a disaster made by Net Zero

‘We face a long night’, warned Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez yesterday evening, after much of Spain, Portugal and south-west France were plunged into darkness by the worst power outage in European history. Tens of millions of people were left without electricity. Trains were halted, planes were grounded and the internet was shut down. Modern life ground to a halt across the Iberian Peninsula. Although the exact causes of the blackout have yet to be declared, we can be certain of one thing: the risk of such outages will only get worse as we embark on the path towards Net Zero.

Spain and Portugal are increasingly reliant on solar and wind power. Renewables were supplying 80 per cent of electricity just before the outages. The blackouts were triggered by a rapid loss of power – of around 15GW, the equivalent of 60 per cent of Spain’s national electricity demand. It is not clear what exactly led to this loss, although a cyber attack has been ruled out. What matters is that a renewable-heavy grid is far less able to absorb this kind of shock than one that runs on traditional energy sources.

Coal and gas plants, or hydroelectric dams, have what is called ‘inertia’ built into the system, whereas wind and solar do not. The spinning turbines used in traditional energy generation will not immediately grind to a halt when there is a fault, acting as a buffer against power outages. ‘In a low-inertia environment’, explains energy expert Kathryn Porter, ‘if you have had a significant grid fault in one area, or a cyber attack, or whatever it may be, the grid operators therefore have less time to react. That can lead to cascading failures if you cannot get it under control quickly.’

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Could renewable energy be to blame for huge Spain blackout? How outage struck days after country’s grid ran entirely on green power for the first time

Widespread power outages hit several countries in Western Europe this afternoon, triggering chaos as rail networks, traffic lights and communications networks went down. 

The shocking blackouts, which struck around 12.15pm CEST have impacted millions of people with almost all of Spain and Portugal affected. 

Parts of France, Andorra and Belgium also suffered outages, according to the most recent reports. 

Several metro and rail passengers were reportedly stranded in Madrid and Lisbon, while the international airports of both capital cities and several other airports across Spain and Portugal were closed.

Spain’s state electricity network operator Red Electrica said on X it had begun to restore power in the north and south of Spain, adding it may take some time to bring the whole grid back online.

Some critics have claimed that Spain’s integration of renewable energy sources into the European power network could have triggered the blackout, though the cause has not yet been established. 

Renewable energy sources – wind, hydro and solar power – met the electricity demand for all of Spain for the first time ever on April 16, according to Red Electrica, which says it is leading an ‘ecological transition’ in Spain’s energy sector.

Other theories include a cyber attack, as analysts pointed out that Europe’s energy grid has suffered a substantial increase in cyber attacks following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Meanwhile, a fire in southern France is reported to have damaged a high-voltage powerline between Perpignan and Narbonne, which may also have contributed to the outages, according to Portugal’s national electric company REN.

Red Electrica is now working with two of Spain’s largest electric companies, Endesa and Iberdrola, to investigate the cause of the outages. 

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Muslims Threaten to Sue Spain in Strasbourg Over Holy Week Processions, Claim They “Offend Islam.”

A group of British Muslims of Iranian origin, led by Anjem Choudary, is threatening to file a lawsuit before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

They allege that Spain’s traditional Holy Week processions are an “offense to Islam” and to the Prophet Muhammad, demanding their immediate ban.

The Muslim group intends to sue Spain in Strasbourg over these Catholic processions, with Choudary arguing that these religious events, rooted in Catholic tradition since 1978, are a “provocation” against Muslims.

“It’s an offense to the thousands of Muslims forced to live in secrecy ,” declared the leader, known for his history of radical statements. The legal challenge seeks to have Spain suspend these centuries-old celebrations, triggering a strong backlash throughout the country.

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The Socialist Autocrat of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, Targets Foreign Property Buyers with a 100% Tax While Daring to Criticize Trump’s Tariffs.

Spain’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez — the most corrupt and autocratic socialist in recent history leading a far-left coalition — has announced a stunning policy: a 
100% tax on real estate purchases by non-EU foreigners.

Recently unveiled, this measure threatens to destabilize Spain’s housing market, scare off investors, and allegedly prioritize housing for locals — all at the expense of economic growth. Yet Sánchez dares to call President Donald Trump’s tariffs “unfair,” revealing a level of hypocrisy that no longer surprises anyone.

Comrade Sánchez presents this tax as a solution to Spain’s housing crisis. He cites data showing that in 2023, non-EU buyers — Americans, Brits, and others — purchased 27,000 properties, often as investments rather than primary residences.

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