President Donald Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is warning that the United States is at risk of major widespread blackouts similar to the power cuts that recently shut down most of Spain and Portugal.
In a new interview, Burgum said the blackouts in Europe were caused by over-subsidizing intermittent renewable energy sources.
However, he warns that America is now “dangerously close” to suffering from similar “rolling blackouts and grid failure.”
Speaking to David Freeberg on “The All-In Podcast,” Burgum admitted that the artificial intelligence (AI) “arms race” with China keeps him “awake at night” due to the amount of electricity that the technology requires.
“We just saw in Spain, they were celebrating on April 12th of this past month that they’d shut down their last coal plant,” Burgum explains.
“A week after that, they were celebrating the fact that they had their first day of 100% renewables on their system.
“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.”
Burgum attributed the devastating blackouts to a fundamental flaw in relying solely on