Buoyed by a surge in investment and new projects, wind power has become Spain’s main source of electricity generation just as Europe seeks to curb its energy imports from Russia.
“We are on suitable ground here,” said Joaquin Garcia Latorre, project director at Enel Green Power Espana, pointing to gigantic masts erected on the heights of the tiny northeastern village of Villar de los Navarros.
The Spanish-Italian firm picked this spot, which is well exposed to the wind, to set up a 180 megawatt wind farm, one of the country’s biggest.
Photo: AFP
Dubbed Tico Wind, its 43 wind turbines started producing power in November last year, Latorre said, as workers around him tended to the turbines, which are more than 100m high.
“There are between 2,500 and 3,000 hours of wind here per year,” he added.
The wind farm would be able to produce 471 gigawatt (GW) hours per year — enough to meet the demands of 148,000 households — after it becomes fully operational in a month.
These types of projects have popped up across Spain in the past few years, making it Europe’s second-biggest wind power producer after Germany for installed capacity and the world’s fifth biggest.
Wind power became the main source of electricity production in Spain last year, accounting for 23 percent, ahead of nuclear (21 percent) and gas (17 percent), national grid operator Red Electrica de Espana said.
The sector “benefits from a favorable situation,” although “brakes” remain on its development, such as a dependency on government auctions, said Francisco Valverde Sanchez, renewables specialist at electricity consultants Menta Energia.
Following a boom in the 2000s, thanks to generous public financial aid, the sector experienced a sudden halt when subsidies were slashed in 2013 during Spain’s economic crisis.
It has since charged ahead.
Spain, which has a total of 1,265 wind farms, had an installed wind power capacity of 28.1GW last year, up from 23.4GW in 2018, the Spanish Wind Energy Association (AEE) said.
With large swathes of sparsely populated land, a favorable legal framework and cutting-edge wind turbine makers, Spain is one of the most “interesting” markets for wind power investors, AEE director-general Juan Virgilio Marquez said.
Spain is home to several sector heavyweights such as Iberdrola and Naturgay Energy Group SA, making it a top exporter of wind power equipment.
“This explains the dynamism of the sector,” Marquez said.
Investor interest has even come from outside of the energy sector.
In November last year, Spain’s Amancio Ortega, the founder of fast fashion giant Zara SA and one of the world’s richest men, injected 245 million euros (US$266.47 million) into a wind farm in the northeastern region of Aragon.
Spain in 2020 pledged to generate 74 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, up from 47 percent.
To meet this target, Spain is counting on the development of offshore wind power, a sector that is in its infancy.
As Spain has thousands of kilometers of coastline, offshore wind has lots of room to grow.
“This is an ambitious goal,” Valverde Sanchez said, adding that government bureaucracy around wind farm projects must be reduced for it to be met.
Nearly 600 wind power projects are under study by the government, AEE said.
In response to the economic fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Spain has pledged to speed up the approval of wind power projects of less than 75 megawatts.
“Our country had enough natural resources to become Europe’s leading producer and exporter of renewable energy,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Wednesday, adding that this could be key to helping the EU meet its goal of “energy independence.”
After Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, Brussels declared a mission to cut the EU’s Russian gas imports by two-thirds this year and to end the use of Russian gas by 2027.
Spain “could become the energy ‘breadbasket’ of Europe,” Virgilio Marquez said.
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