Interior Secretary Warns U.S. At Risk Of Spain-Style Blackouts

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum warned the United States is at risk of suffering from blackouts that recently brought most of Spain to a halt due to over-subsidizing intermittent renewable energy sources. 

“We just saw in Spain, they were celebrating on April 12th of this past month that they’d shut down their last coal plant. A week after that, they were celebrating the fact that they had their first day of 100% renewables on their system,” Burgum said in an interview with All-In podcast co-host David Friedberg. “Then, the next week, they were a global news story because people were trapped in subways, all airline flights canceled, hospitals were panicking with a lack of power because they had a rolling blackout and grid failure.”

.@SecretaryBurgum to @friedberg: China’s Energy Dominance in AI Race Keeps Me Awake at Night

“If you were to ask me what’s the thing that keeps me awake at night, this is the issue. It’s so thrilling and refreshing that you understand the scale, the magnitude, and the importance… pic.twitter.com/VD8kDU2wt7

— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) May 7, 2025

The Interior secretary attributed Spain’s blackouts to a fundamental flaw in relying solely on intermittent power sources like solar and wind, saying, “It just defies physics. You can’t run an electrical grid with just intermittent power. You cannot run with something that is based on intermittent, which is the definition of solar or wind, because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and the wind doesn’t blow every day.”

Burgum then said that the U.S. is teetering on the edge of a similar fate due to misguided energy policies embraced by the Biden administration.

“We became dangerously close to that right now. We’ve got parts of our country that are at risk for those same kind of—what I’ll call the Biden brownouts and blackouts—to happen,” the Trump official told Friedberg.

Burgum criticized the over-subsidization of intermittent renewable energy and the stringent regulations on stable base load power sources like coal and nuclear, arguing that these measures, driven by the goal to “save the planet,” are jeopardizing national energy security. “All we’re doing is potentially putting our own country at risk,” he stressed, urging a reevaluation of energy policies to ensure a reliable grid capable of supporting the Trump administraion’s technological and economic ambitions, especially in the face of China’s rapid energy expansion.

Watch the full interview:

Spain faced severe blackouts just weeks after celebrating the closure of its last coal plant and a day of 100% renewable energy. The grid, reliant on intermittent solar and wind, collapsed, trapping people in subways, canceling flights, and leaving hospitals in chaos.

As Michael Shellenberger reports at PUBLIC, the blackout in Spain was not an isolated incident—it reverberated across the entire European grid.

“Although political leaders promised that renewable energy would provide stable, affordable power, in practice, Spain grew more reliant on the remaining nuclear and natural gas plants to sustain inertia — even as the government pushes them to close,” Shellenberger writes.

“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,” he added.