Interruptions in electricity supply, ‘the lights going out,’ make for arresting headlines and capture public attention. The reality of what actually happened, and why, is messy and complex.

Over the last decade — which was an era of rapid growth in renewable energy — not a single major power outage in markets with high shares of renewables was caused by an over-reliance on these variable resources. Nor were they caused by a shortfall of investment in traditional fossil-fuel resources, also referred to as ‘dispatchable’ resources. What causes emerged from deep analysis of the events? Each was caused by one or more of the following:

• Extreme weather events or natural disasters
• Failures in transmission or fuel-supply infrastructure
• A combination of both fossil and renewable generation failures
• Failures to update or enforce planning, regulation and grid codes, drawing on lessons learned from elsewhere

Despite documented evidence of the root causes of these outages, the fossil energy industry continues to promote the narrative that more fossil generation is needed and that the growing shift to renewables is undermining and driving up the cost of secure power supply.

To dispel many of the myths surrounding the causes of recent significant power outages, this toolkit looks at five case studies: the Iberian blackout 2025, Texas 2021, California 2020, Great Britain 2019 and the South Australian blackout 2016.

These case studies show the importance of setting the record straight quickly, credibly and substantively. This package equips the reader with information and tools to respond quickly to the misinformation that spreads rapidly in the wake of power grid reliability events. What aspects can the reader explore? This toolkit:

• Offers insight into reliability events, and their causes and consequences
• Provides a checklist to understand and analyse emerging reliability events (a separate checklist can be downloaded here: Power grid rapid response checklist)
• Provides holding lines for advocates of clean energy during the information vacuum that normally follows a major outage
• Explains why there is no reason for the growth in renewables to detrimentally affect power system stability, not least given the efforts of system operators and regulators to address challenges associated with the energy transition

Original toolkit published: December 14, 2022