Mark Stücklin
Grid over-reliance on wind and solar may have played a role in the Iberian blackout, but for homeowners, the lesson is clear: investing in self-consumption is the smart path to greater energy resilience.
Did renewables trigger the outage?
While it’s too soon for definitive answers, early speculation suggests that Spain’s growing reliance on renewable energy to feed the national grid may have played a key role in the cascade of failures that caused the blackout. At the time of the outage, wind and solar were generating the bulk of the country’s electricity. The problem? These sources are unstable by nature—unlike gas, nuclear, or hydro, which can be dispatched on demand regardless of weather conditions. Their intermittent nature and the way their output interacts with the grid can contribute to instability, potentially leading to major disruptions like a national blackout.
Renewables are essential to any modern, sustainable energy grid—but even green power has its limits. Every country needs to strike the right balance, and in Spain’s case, that balance may be tipping too far. If the renewable share has overshot the grid’s capacity to cope, more blackouts could be on the horizon.
Resilience starts at home
If there’s a silver lining for homeowners, it’s that the sun still shines—and now it’s easier than ever to harness it for self-consumption. Spain is blessed with some of the highest solar potential in Europe, and the country’s legal framework for home solar generation has improved dramatically in recent years.
Let’s not forget, Spain was once the only modern country actively discouraging home solar adoption. Back in 2015, the conservative Partido Popular government under Mariano Rajoy introduced the infamous “sun tax” (Impuesto al Sol) under Royal Decree 900/2015, though the draft decree with plans to penalise home self-consumption came out in 2013. Despite the name, it wasn’t a direct tax on sunlight—it was a fee on self-consumed electricity from systems over 10 kW, plus a mess of bureaucratic hurdles that made home solar costly and unattractive. The logic? Everyone should help pay for the grid, even if they barely used it.
Fortunately, that nonsense ended in 2018 when the Socialist government repealed the sun tax and began dismantling the red tape. Royal Decree-Law 15/2018 scrapped the levy, simplified self-consumption, enabled energy sharing (for example, in apartment buildings), and allowed compensation for surplus energy fed back into the grid. It was a long-overdue turning point.
Then, in 2019, Royal Decree 244/2019 took things even further—establishing a comprehensive framework that made solar self-consumption truly viable for homeowners and small businesses alike.
Solar savings and the global glut
So what now? With memories of the blackout still fresh, many Spanish homeowners may be eyeing solar panels and batteries to shore up their resilience. And here’s the interesting twist: thanks to Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese solar tech (and the US market pulling back as a result), a glut of Chinese panels and parts could soon be flooding the global market. That could spell bargain prices for European buyers—though maybe not immediately.
I expect there could be a short-term price increase for solar panels, batteries and backup generators as demand surges in the immediate aftermath of the blackout. But give it a few months, and as Chinese supply starts seeking new outlets, Spain could be one of the best places in the world to invest in home solar at unbeatable prices.
The bottom line? Whether or not renewables were to blame for the blackout, they’re certainly part of the solution. And in sunny Spain, building your own household resilience has never made more sense if you lived through the discomfort of feeling utterly powerless during last Monday’s blackout.
If you want to stay informed about solar self-consumption, resilience, and the best times to invest, make sure you’re signed up to my newsletter—I’ll be writing a lot more on this topic in the coming months.
