The shiny new disinfo tactic being rolled out by fossil defenders
Watch a video version of this blog post, here or below 🙂
Not quite there yet, but soon it’ll be one year since a major blackout impacted Spain and Portugal – one of the biggest blackouts to ever hit Europe since the creation of the modern grid. The fact Spain is also a hotspot for solar power growth in Europe meant it was immediately slapped with a ‘green blackout’ label by deniers and disinformation purveyors, ranging from the most rancid social media accounts to seemingly respectable professional columnists at large media outlets.
I’ve been tracking disinformation around blackouts for nearly ten years now, since the September 2016 outage in South Australia shifted the entire country’s energy politics semi-permanently. I wrote about that one in my book, published in 2020.
Since the April 2025 blackout in Spain, I wrote about disinformation in the early days of the event, I created a primer on how to spot disinformation in the midst, wrote about how politicised blackouts tend not to wreck energy transitions, wrote about the weird lack of scrutiny on nuclear power, wrote about how Bloomberg completely misinterpreted a report on voltage in Europe to blame Spain’s solar, wrote about how grid-scale generation-related blackouts are basically non-existent now in Australia as it breezes past 50% renewables and spoke to a range of media outlets about this whole deal.
I’m humble-bragging because I want to make a simple point: I know the recognisable tactics and through-lines when it comes to pro-fossil, pro-nuclear players trying to exploit grid events to attack renewables and push their preferred machine.
Which is why I found it so lovely to see, for the first time in a long time, someone come up with a new tactic.
Thank you for doing something different
As I’ve written a few times, disinformation efforts follow some basic patterns around blackouts. Blame renewables if they’re anywhere near what happened. Shop for causes: you can hold five conflicting theories at the same time, as long as each finds renewables the culprit. Hopefully one will be right. Don’t present it as fixable: there can be no cure beyond ending renewables. And finally, politicise the hell out of it – call for major policy changes to kill renewables.
I’d heard rumblings that Europe’s grid operator, ENTSO, was due to publish a ‘final’ report into the Spain blackout. Their October 2025 ‘factual report‘ was pretty dry, but pretty interesting, but the ‘final’ report was set to contain many juicy details, even if it probably avoids laying blame.
On March 15th, an X account named ‘Electroverse’ posted this (it has thousands of reposts):
Electroverse is written by someone by the name of Cap Allon, who seems to have been pushing out climate denier content for some time across some sites, but in November 2025 started pumping out these videos, all with the same style and narrated voice.
And jeez, how damning! Looks like the final report shows renewables really did it. The video even features screenshots from ENTSO’s new report:
Man, that’s damning! Looks like ENTSO’s final report really drives the knife into renewables. Hoo boy, was I wrong to defend wind and solar.
It was reposted the next day, March 16th, by Lucy Biggers, head of social at the climate-skeptic outlet ‘The Free Press’ (and self-styled ‘reformed climate activist’):
Here’s the fun part: I discovered these posts on March 20th.
THE DAY THE ACTUAL REPORT WAS RELEASED.
Yes, that’s right, ENTSO-E released their ‘final report‘ into the Spain blackout on Friday the 20th of March, a full five days after the Electroverse post.
As everyone basically expected, the final report finds a complicated mix of factors primarily relating to bad voltage settings on most of the generators on the grid, both at thermal generators like nuclear and gas but also at some solar and wind farms – all of which can be fixed with recommendations laid out in the report.
This is a pretty new tactic: just flat-out lying about a major report release five days before it actually comes out. This is something you can do now on fever-swamp disinformation sites like Grok-brained X and Substack (where the worst deniers are among the most popular in the ‘climate’ category).
I think I know why they’re getting desperate
Even just a year ago, this is all had to be a bit more complex. You had people blurting out words like ‘inertia’ and ‘frequency’ and generally just putting a little more nuance and craft into lying. Here in March 2026, you can just…….lie about the report release.
This is a pretty dirty tactic, even for groups that have been playing dirty for a long time. Obviously, on X, you can just sort of blurt out whatever you want without facing pushback beyond a few hundred men asking a polluting chatbot whether it’s true.
But I wonder if it’s a sign of desperation, too. In the early weeks of the blackout, the chant among pro-fossil, pro-nuke guys was that the problem was ‘insufficient inertia‘, because wind and solar don’t help provide the grid’s heartbeat you get from spinning rotors like those found in coal, gas and nuclear turbines. That was picked because it automatically and incurably implicates wind and solar.
Once that was shown to be false, the narrative shifted towards voltage issues. But the Bloomberg article was based on a catastrophic misunderstanding of a grid report and it still hasn’t been corrected, nor have any of the now clearly false posts from Bloomberg’s Javier Blas or climate skeptic Bjorn Lomborg been deleted.
In October, after the release of the interim report, another narrative took hold that I didn’t even notice: the idea that because wind and solar tripped first in the rapid collapse of everything on the grid, that means they were somewhere responsible for the blackout. In fact this seems to be where whoever made that video has sourced the chart they pretend was from the ‘final’ report (but was from the October report):
Bjorn Lomborg does not understand power grids at the best of times, and definitely doesn’t understand the cascading, interrelated network of cause and effect that happens during a blackout. In fact, the full report highlights most of those disconnections occurred as a consequence of the collapse rather than a primary triggering cause of the collapse. Failing to actually read and understand any of these reports isn’t really a bug, it’s a feature.
And so is the ‘quantum theory‘ of blackout disinformation: renewables were to blame, but for 5 different and contradictory reasons all at the same time, with the prominence of each reduced or raised depending on how much bullshit is allowed. But in rising desperation, they have to throw growing quantities of shit at the wall, and hope to god something sticks.
An actual, detailed report that essentially destroys every single mutated variant of their theories comes at a really bad time for everyone involved in this little ecosystem of lies. This is because there is also a major global fossil fuel crisis playing out, caused by bloody conflict and happening for the second time this decade, and Spain’s material shift towards decreased reliance on fossil fuels has resulted in a at least a noticeable protection against the crippling costs of fossil fuels.
This, to me, is also a major part of why climate deniers and fossil fuel advocates might resort to the gutter fraud tactic of pretending the final report was released, five days before it actually was.
They haven’t just lost the public around why that blackout occurred. They have also lost the broader debate: the devastating impacts of fossil fuels are about to hit us all harder than any blackout ever could. We don’t need a 500 page report to prove prolonged reliance on oil and gas are fully to blame for the crisis about to hit the world in the face.
For years and years, they’ve been trying to paint the consequence of renewables as catastrophe, in the form of dramatic blackouts. Well, we’re about to live through an actual energy-related catastrophe: and it’s caused by fossil fuels, and eased by renewables.
If I’d dedicated my life to boosting what has now become the world’s deadliest and most expensive fuel product, I’d be desperate too.