Reactivating self-consumption in low hours and making the deployment of new electrical networks a reality with new planning until 2030 are among the key tasks that the new third vice president and minister for the Ecological Transition, Sara Aagesen, will face in the coming months.
After a few first weeks at the head of the ministry marked by the commotion of the DANA in Valencia, a tight energy agenda awaits the former Secretary of State for Energy for the new year. 2024 has been a year of a certain hiatus in this department, first due to the European elections in June (with Teresa Ribera as head of the PSOE list) and then due to the waiting period for Aagesen’s predecessor to become executive vice president of the Commission European.
The most immediate thing on the ministry’s table is the approval of the draft of the new planning for the 2025-2030 electrical network, on which the system operator, Red Eléctrica, has been working for months. Ecological Transition, which began its processing on the eve of Christmas Eve 2023, will put the proposal out for consultation shortly, possibly in January.
This planning must be approved before the end of 2025 and will establish the development needs of the transport network until the end of the decade. It will be key to realizing the objectives of the new update of the National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan (PNIEC), with more than 300,000 million euros of associated investment, and which was sent to Brussels in September.
As Alejandro Labanda, director of Ecological Transition at the consulting firm beBartlet, points out, the new planning “is expected to generate a lot of noise at the political and business level.” There already was with the current one (2021-2026) and “there will always be autonomous communities that feel aggrieved and companies that complain about not having entered.”
The PNIEC contains very ambitious goals for renewables, hydrogen production or storage and electrification of the economy and for this the networks will be essential. For the planning that is going to be approved now, the expansion of green hydrogen and the famous data centers will come into play “and to what extent we want to host this type of industries,” says this expert.
One of the options being considered is for the ministry to launch an auction system to order the connection to the network of these centers, which have already been vetoed by some city council, such as Lleida, due to their high consumption of water and energy. The new PNIEC, a document of more than 700 pages, dedicates just one line to these facilities, stating that “a regulatory framework will be promoted that promotes and orders sustainable installation.”
In this context, it is foreseeable that the Government will revise upward the limits on investment in transport and distribution that the sector has been demanding for years, in a year in which the new networks’ remuneration circular must be in force. This task corresponds to the National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC) or the announced National Energy Commission (CNE), whose creation is being delayed due to the precarious parliamentary arithmetic in Congress. When the CNE recovery bill was approved in February, Ribera was confident that it would be ready by the end of 2024.
In view of this new circular of the networks, in October Ecological Transition published some unusual “guidelines” to the CNMC, due to their specificity, on how the remuneration rate of the networks should be calculated, which were completely in line with company requests.
Among the most relevant aspects of the new course will also be the expected new self-consumption regulations, which the Ecological Transition offices expect to be in force around the middle of the year.
In October, the ministry put out for prior consultation a draft Royal Decree that regulates the administrative, technical and economic conditions of this energy solution, which has been in the doldrums for months. After the boom experienced during the price crisis of 2021 and 2022, at the end of the third quarter, self-consumption registered a drop of 15% compared to the first nine months of 2023, mainly in the industrial sector (-22%) but also in residential (-5%) and in commercial (-1%), according to estimates by the sector association Unef. Companies in the sector such as Holaluz or EiDF, among others, have been in serious difficulties for months.
Expectation
In the sector there is expectation regarding the degree of ambition of the reform. The current regulations are designed above all for individual self-consumption installations. The European directives are committed to going further and developing ways to share energy, give another treatment to surpluses, promote collective installations or promote energy communities.
And it remains to be seen if sharing self-consumption is allowed at a greater distance than the 2 kilometers that are currently allowed, as is the case in other European countries. Some even allow collective self-consumption as long as they are installations and consumers connected to the same low or medium voltage network, regardless of the distance.
In Aagesen’s ministry they place the new regulations to promote a capacity market as “one of the priorities of the regulatory agenda”. This is a kind of anti-blackout “insurance” that will be launched next year, with the expectation of launching the first auction at the beginning of the year.
It will be one of the ways to boost storage, the regulation of which still needs to be completed. In Spain, according to the Storage Roadmap, there is more than 8 GW of capacity to store electricity (the vast majority, 6.5 GW, is pumped hydroelectric), and the PNIEC sets the ambitious goal of reaching 22 GW by 2030 .
Part of it will be through batteries, whose deployment, as a recent ONE report points out, “is encountering more obstacles than in other European countries.” In order to add the almost 14 GW of storage necessary to meet the PNIEC objectives, “there is still a lot to do.”
That Spain can store more energy is key due to the poor interconnection with France, which conditions the deployment of renewables. Energy storage helps to alleviate network congestion at times of greatest energy supply, saving the surplus and releasing it at times of least renewable generation, allowing the substitution of fossil fuels to be consolidated.
With this, it will be possible to increase the electrification process, which in Spain is advancing at a much slower pace than renewable deployment. Electricity still has a weight of only 22% in the national energy mix. The reduced implementation of heat pumps, the low penetration of electric vehicles and the still low use of electricity in industrial processes lead to moments in which more renewable energy is generated than is consumed. The result is the so-called energy discharges, which in 2023 reached 1.18% of the total renewable energy produced in Spain, according to data from the European association of regulators ACER.
Among the pending issues is also the development of a new Energy Poverty Strategy to replace the one that has existed until now (2019-2024); The approval of the ministerial order that must set the conditions for carrying out the first offshore wind auctions in Spain, and the transposition of several European regulations. Among them, the one known as the gas package (key to the deployment of renewable gases), and the renewable directive known as Network III, which increases the commitment of Member States by 2030 regarding the share of energy in final consumption. gross from clean sources from 32% to 42.5%. To transpose the latter there is a deadline of May 21.
Among its novelties is the obligation to prepare plans that indicate the “renewable acceleration zones” for one or more types of clean energy sources in which the procedures will be simplified: positive silence if there is no response from the Administration, a very environmental procedure simpler and shorter deadlines. Its transfer to the Spanish legal system “will have a special impact on hydrogen and transportation,” says Labanda.
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