CURTIS SCHUBE: Spain’s Blackout Is A Cautionary Tale

The contrast in headlines, separated only by a week, should be sobering for those who push for renewable energy. On April 22, 2025, PV Magazine hailed “Spain hits first weekday of 100% renewable power on national grid.” A week later, on April 29, the same outlet’s headline reads “Spain’s nationwide blackout leaves millions in the dark, cause still unclear.”

Delgado Rigal, CEO of Spain’s AleaSoft Energy Forecasting, stated that the Spanish grid is “intended for turbine system and synchronism which are planned to work on a rotational scheme,” and “with renewables, this configuration may become a problem.”

Rigal does try to hedge, so as to not place blame on renewable energy. But the timing is more than suspect. And, it is known that renewable energies are not reliable. Wind and solar are both highly reliant upon the weather, which is itself not predictable. If wind or sun conditions are not cooperating, energy is not produced.

And, the technology to store wind and solar energy is not yet developed. This means there are periods where renewable energy is producing more energy than the grid needs. There are other times when it does not produce enough to meet the grid’s needs.

Take Texas, for example, who experienced widespread power outages in the Winter of 2021. While other failures occurred, low wind, combined with frozen turbines, resulted in wind energy not contributing to the grid.

Renewable energy is not only unreliable from a production standpoint, but also economically. The Production Tax Credit (PTC) and Investment Tax Credit (ITC) both pay renewable energy companies per kilowatt-hour of production. They are paid whether the electricity is needed or not on the grid. This is problematic. Wind energy, for example, comes in surges. When there is too much wind, it causes an oversupply, which drives prices down so low that it creates negative pricing. As a result, energy companies can actually pay the grid to take their energy, and yet still remain profitable—but only because of the subsidies.

In addition, both wind and solar are more expensive to produce as compared to coal and nuclear power. According to one dataset, wind energy costs roughly $65 per megawatt hour to produce. Nuclear costs about $41. Coal costs roughly $33. This is true even with tax credits. If companies were not to receive tax credits, the cost of wind energy is even more for the consumer at a whopping $72, over double the cost of coal.

Absent government intervention (in the form of tax credits), renewable energy would never survive. No company that has to pay the consumer to take their product would survive. No company whose product is more expensive to the consumer would survive. Renewable energy suffers from both problems.

This begs the question: is it a wise use of taxpayer dollars to continue to subsidize an industry that does not produce reliable energy and could not survive on its own merit?  A Treasury Department estimate shows that in 2024 alone, the United States Government spent $31.4 billion on renewable energy. That number is set to add up to $421 billion between 2025 and 2034.

Indeed, this practice of artificially propping up the renewably energy industry also has the negative effect of putting other energy sources at a disadvantage. Traditional energy industries do not receive these subsidies. They cannot sell their excess to the grid at a loss. By propping up renewable energy, the United States government is putting other energy at a competitive disadvantage. So, what happens when those industries are forced out of the picture? The answer very well might be what Spain is experiencing right now.

During this time of reconciliation bills, Congress should reevaluate the PTC and ITC. The United States government should not continue throwing money at an industry that is not sustainable on its own. Otherwise, taxpayers could be forced to pay these subsidies indefinitely, only to receive an inferior product.

Curtis Schube is the Executive Director for Council to Modernize Governance, a think tank committed to making the administration of government more efficient, representative, and restrained. He is formerly a constitutional and administrative law attorney.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.