The Ministry for the Ecological Transition reserves 5,000 kilometers to install the first wind turbines on the sea in Spain
The Council of Ministers has given the green light this morning to the first Maritime Space Management Plan (POEM) that will serve, among other things, for the deployment of offshore wind power. A first step that comes after several delays: “It has been an arduous and complicated process,” say sources from the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge. With this approval, the department led by Teresa Ribera allocates 5,000 square kilometers of Spanish waters for the deployment of offshore wind power.
Under this guideline, this renewable technology will only have available 0.46% of the almost one million square kilometers of territorial waters ordered in these plans. Specifically, there are 18 areas off the Spanish coast “and only there can these parks be installed”, they point out from MITECO.
A new variable that companies in the renewable energy sector will have to add to deployment projects. “The areas have been greatly reduced since the first published drafts,” they add. According to data held by the Spanish Wind Association (AEE) at the end of 2022 there were 15 offshore wind projects, but in a very initial phase. “We are running late and we cannot stop,” warns a senior manager in the sector.
These plans have delimited Spanish waters according to environmental, maritime security and national defense criteria. “The protection of sensitive and vulnerable ecosystems, habitats and species is guaranteed”, comments Teresa Ribera’s team. Thus, the offshore wind farms will be included in the ZAPs, areas of high potential. “Companies have identified areas where they would like to develop their projects, we have delimited them.”
A work in which they have participated from the autonomous communities to different actors of civil society. “We must not make the same mistake as with the terrestrial one and put wind turbines everywhere,” says Cristóbal López, spokesman for the marine area of Ecologistas en Acción.
In the same way that occurs with wind turbines on land, companies will have to present their environmental impact statement. For the moment, the approved POEMs will be valid until December 31, 2027 and the ministry hopes that it will serve to test the technology and achieve the objectives set in the National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan (PNIEC).
Conflicts and complaints
Despite being considered one of the levers on which the Spanish economy will drive towards decarbonisation and reach 3GW of clean energy in 2030, critical voices have not been long in coming, even before pressing the on switch.
“There are great unknowns, but the impacts are evident, whether you want to disguise them or not,” reveals Torcuato Teixeira, manager of the Peca-Galicia-Arpega-Obarco Shipowners Association.
From the Miteco they assure that “everyone has been heard.” One of the demands of the environmental NGOs has been that these facilities be 30 or 40 meters above the sea to “avoid influencing fishing and bird feeding.” A claim also welcomed by the tourism sector so as not to modify the landscape of the coasts.
However, they have not been collected in all places “due to the peculiarities of the Spanish coast.” The continental shelf of the Iberian Peninsula is not very wide: “In Spain it is very narrow and you soon reach the continental slope where, suddenly, they reach depths of 2,500 meters in the Mediterranean and up to 4,000 meters in the Atlantic.” For this reason, a common minimum distance has not been set and those that have been established, says the ministry, have been made in agreement with the Autonomous Communities.
For example, the shortest distance to the coast is in the Canary Islands, where one of the polygons is just 1,850 meters away. While in Galicia, the minimum is established at 21 kilometers.
Precisely, the North Atlantic area is the one that will have the most surface available for the development of offshore parks with almost more than 2,500 square kilometers of the 5,000 available. The Levantine-Balearic zone is the smallest with 475 square kilometers, followed by the Canary Islands with 561 square kilometers. “They are enough to achieve the objectives of the PNIEC,” say ministry sources.
Most in China
Currently, according to data from the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena), offshore wind capacity is 60 GW, a figure that is far from the 2,000 GW that the international organization estimates to help keep the world temperature at 1 .5 degrees and achieve zero emissions.
In total, currently, 33 new offshore wind farms have come online worldwide, where China brings together most of them. The sea that bathes the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands has an average depth of 700 meters and is the one that brings together much of the energy generated under this technology.
In Spain, the lack of legislative development and the complication of the terrain under the sea have slowed down its development. Currently, of the 28,210 megawatts of ‘offshore’ installed, 99.6% are fixed foundations.
#Government #publishes #map #deployment #offshore #wind