At the end of June, the Central 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 by a 23% to 32% and lays the groundwork for making Spain a carbon-neutral country by 2050.
In this document, the Ministry of Ecological Transition once again parks the concept of technological neutrality and makes a clear commitment to renewable generation, a technology which, however, has not yet provided the necessary regulatory tools to guarantee its maximum development .
Today, the main handicap of renewables continues to be intermittency, because they are available fewer hours a day 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 the Government’s forecasts .
The alternative to this intermittency is energy storage. The draft envisages having a capacity of 22 GW in 2030, more than three times the current capacity, 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 into hydroelectric power plants.
When demand is lower, a pumping station uses surplus renewable electricity to raise water from the lower reservoir to the upper one and store this energy in the form of reservoir water. To develop this technology, which has already been implemented in many countries around us, it is necessary for the regulator to create a “capacity market”, the mechanism responsible for regulating the storage and pumping of water, something which is still pending in our country.
In addition, renewables have the particularity that I pointed out earlier: their production is concentrated in certain time slots, which favors the appearance of the famous “zero price”. This discourages investment when the developer does not see an economic return and harms the deployment of a technology that, combined with storage, can be more effective during peak demand hours. 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 viable the electrolyzers that will generate this sustainable gas, which will be key to decarbonizing the industry and producing renewable fuels. For decades, Spain has been very ambitious in its deployment of renewable energies, but it has made mistakes that have cost consumers a lot of money and damaged the country’s prestige with international investors.
