live in spain historic self-consumption boom electric. The expansion of new facilities broke records last year. electricity prices in the midst of the energy crisis and thanks direct help funded by european funds. The massive deployment is causing some traffic jams, which is hindering further growth, according to industry reports.
On the one hand, bureaucratic traffic jams for obtaining all administrative permits and accessing public assistance from the Recovery Plan for self-consumption. On the other hand, traffic congestion to connect to the electricity grid so that new power plants can supply energy and generate income from it.
This Vice President and Minister ecological transition, Teresa Ribera, The photovoltaic employers’ association took advantage of the opening of the Third Self-Consumption Summit, organized by UNEF, to fully charge distribution companies with ink as they put so-called barriers to networking new self-consumption plants.
“We have to go beyond the processing challenges in Public Administrations, and from here I urge distributors to take seriously this service function of connecting all self-consumption, not just when these facilities are their own companies,” Ribera said. He said that he understood the “anger” and “concern” of companies in the sector.
Networking problems
Self-consumption plants with a power of more than 15 kilowatts (kw) are already obliged to obtain permission from the distribution network managers. large electrical groups such as Endesa, iberdrola anyone improvisation– to be able to connect and thus be able to discharge and compensate for excess electricity.
The renewables sector criticizes the long wait to gain access to the distribution network. In fact, according to El Confidencial, the National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC) has initiated the first proceedings to ensure that there are no intentional barriers to accessing the self-consumption network.
Ribera realized that large distributors could support their own renewable subsidiaries, and their own self-consumption by prioritizing them, particularly in connection with the grid, emphasizing that these practices constitute a “ballast” to stimulate further growth of self-consumption. Spain
In parallel, the vice president also questioned whether the distributors are properly managing the demands for connection to the high voltage grid managed by Red Eléctrica de España and the 10% access capacity allocated by law for self-consumption in the nodes. transportation network
wasted electricity
The 2022 record doubled the size of self-consumption in the country, both in terms of installations (overcoming 298,000 homes and 54,000 companies with solar panels) and accumulated power (with 2,650 new megawatts). In the midst of the boom, however, the industry warns of some major shortcomings in the industry and warns that current legal and technical restrictions are causing millions of losses and wasting large amounts of cheap energy in the midst of an energy crisis. .
In addition to producing electricity to meet some of the consumption of the house or company, these facilities can also generate additional income by injecting some of the amount they produce into the grid. But problems with powering the grid have created a gap of already more than 300m euros in recent years. In practice, electricity is wasted and not used to meet some of the demand of the Spanish electricity system.
Over the past year, all self-consumption facilities operating in the country have generated a total of 4,564 gigawatt hours (GWh), almost 52% more than the previous year and equivalent to 1.8% of all electricity demand in the country. Spain throughout the year, according to data from Red Eléctrica. From employer APPA Renovables, active self-consumption facilities they wasted a fifth of their production potentialand estimated production loss of up to 1,067 GWh last year. It was also in the year of the worst of the energy crisis.
According to the companies, 19% of all possible output of these plants was wasted due to regulatory barriers that made it difficult to transfer this electricity to the grid, which many self-consumers found by distributors. have access to permission to inject their own energy into the grid, and for some legal ones to be compensated for their excess electricity for large facilities.
According to APPA’s calculations, the Spanish electricity system wasted the equivalent of 160 million Euros in renewable energy last year due to the impossibility of evacuating this energy in the power grids, and has accumulated a loss of 274 million Euros since 2015, to which we have to add. The blow accumulated so far this year will far exceed 300 million euros.