At the end of June, the Government sent to Brussels the draft of the update of the National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan 2021-2030 (PNIEC), which increases the objective of reducing emissions from 23% to 32% and lays the foundations to convert make Spain a carbon neutral country in 2050.
In this document, the Ministry of Ecological Transition sets aside the concept of technological neutrality once again and makes a clear commitment to renewable generation, a technology that, however, does not just provide the necessary regulatory tools to guarantee its maximum development.
Today, the main handicap of renewables continues to be their intermittency, due to the fact that fewer hours a day are available due to the lack of wind or sun. In this way, despite the fact that more than 80% of electricity generation will be of renewable origin in 2030, the reality is that the final consumption of this type of energy will not exceed 48%, according to government forecasts. The alternative to this intermittency is energy storage. The draft plans to have a capacity of 22 GW in 2030, more than triple the current one, thanks to the use of various types of storage (batteries, hydrogen…). However, this strategy lacks a more determined commitment to a viable and mature storage technology: pumping water in hydroelectric power plants.
When demand is lower, a pumping station takes advantage of the excess renewable electricity to lift water from the lower reservoir to the upper one and store that energy in the form of dammed water. To develop this technology, which has already been implemented in many neighboring countries, it is necessary for the regulator to create a “capacity market”, the mechanism that is in charge of regulating the storage and pumping of water, something that is still pending in our country.
In addition, renewables have the particularity that I mentioned before: their production is concentrated in certain time slots, which favors the appearance of the famous “zero price”. This discourages investment when the promoter does not see an economic return and harms the deployment of a technology that, combined with storage, can be more effective during the hours of greatest demand. Another technology whose development depends on energy storage is green hydrogen. This sector needs renewable energy to be available more hours a day to make the electrolyzers that will generate this sustainable gas viable, which will be key to decarbonizing the industry and producing renewable fuels. For decades, Spain has been very ambitious in its deployment of renewable energy, but it has made mistakes that have cost consumers a lot of money and damaged the country’s reputation with international investors.
