Mike Hansen

RECORD-BREAKER! The hottest March temperature ever recorded in the United States just occurred Friday at multiple sites in California and Arizona, including near Yuma. It reached 112°! We know it gets hot there in the Summer, but not this hot this early. To put things into perspective, the normal high for that area is 81° for March. Crazy.

Europe's official grid authority has released its report on the nationwide blackout that hit Spain last year. And while the report treads carefully politically, its data make the cause clear. Wind and solar triggered the collapse. Within the first 80 seconds, Spain lost 2.5 GW of generation, around 10% of its national supply, with every MW of that early loss coming from renewables. Gas and hydro remained stable until the cascade was already underway. The report calls it an unprecedented speed of blackout. This was a textbook inverter chain failure, with renewables dropping so fast that the grid's stabilizers never had time to react. By midday, Spain's grid had virtually no inertia, nothing spinning fast enough to hold frequency steady. But to admit that outright would mean questioning Europe's green transition itself, something the report appears unable to do. So the event is officially described as "a rare local disturbance," rather than what it actually was... A systemic failure of weather-dependent power.