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ENERGY

Spain’s government moves to get public to install solar panels

Spain’s government adopted a series of measures on Tuesday aimed at encouraging the public to install solar panels to generate their own electricity as the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s Ukraine war grinds on.

Published: 19 October 2022 09:37 CEST
Spain's government moves to get public to install solar panels
Spanish Environment and Energy Minister Teresa Ribera wants to encourage Spaniards to install solar panels at home. (Photo by JOHN THYS / AFP)

“There is a lot of interest” in the idea of a household generating its own energy, which is “a very reasonable way to reduce our bills,” Spain’s Ecology Minister Teresa Ribera said after the weekly cabinet meeting.

Individual energy generation could be encouraged by means of “a simplified form of regulation,” she said of measures which align with a European push to reduce the bloc’s reliance on Russian gas.

The move simplifies the process for installing solar panels with a power generation capacity of up to 500 kilowatt/hours and seeks to encourage the installation of photovoltaic panels on public buildings.

The Spanish government is also promising tax deductions for people who install solar panels, although it has not yet confirmed how much this will be.

READ ALSO: Do I need a permit to install solar panels in Spain?

It also seeks to drum up support for “collective power generation”, backing the installation of solar panels on apartment blocks in a country where nearly two-thirds of the population live in flats.

Self-generated electricity has been growing rapidly in Spain since 2018, when Madrid abolished a decree requiring individuals who feed energy back into the grid to pay tax.

The tariff had long been decried by its opponents as a “tax on the sun”.

According to Spanish solar power lobby UNEF, the installed capacity for individual energy generation through solar panels reached 1,203 megawatts in 2021, twice that of the 596 megawatts a year earlier.

And the figure is expected to be significantly higher in 2022.

The government’s energy-saving plan seeks to cut Spain’s natural gas consumption by up to 13.5% by March, and it also extends a price cap on gas used to produce electricity until December 2023 in order to alleviate household energy bills.

In April, Spain and Portugal reached an agreement with Brussels to separate electricity prices from the price of gas, allowing them to slash electricity prices.

Known as the “Iberian exception”, the price cap came into effect in June.

READ ALSO: What you should know before getting solar panels for your home in Spain

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ELECTRICITY

How would Spain react if there was a major blackout?

Doomsday series and fake news have made the prospect of a national and Europe-wide outage seem outlandish, and yet we come close to such a critical event. How would Spanish authorities react if there was a days-long power cut?

Published: 28 June 2024 12:48 CEST
How would Spain react if there was a major blackout?

In January, 2021, a technical fault at an electricity plant in Croatia almost knocked out Europe’s entire power grid.

In 2003, 56 million people were left without electricity for several hours in Italy and Switzerland, but there have been outages that have affected far more people and lasted longer, such as the 2012 India blackouts that cut off the supply of electricity for two days to 620 million people. 

Even the entire island of Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands has been hit by two major outages in recent years.

Sri Lanka, Turkey, Zanzibar, Brazil, Pakistan, Venezuela – there are countless other blackouts over the past two decades caused by software errors, network overloads, accidents and adverse weather conditions. 

Most feared of all is the prospect of a solar storm so powerful that the grid couldn’t be restored within a matter of hours, days or weeks. 

Such an apocalyptic scenario was depicted in the 2022 Movistar+ series Apagón (Blackout in English), which follows several people in Spain as they survive in a world without electricity.

The prospect of a solar storm setting us back two centuries seems far-fetched and has been exploited and overblown by fake news sources.

A geomagnetic storm caused by a solar storm did cause a nine-hour outage in Quebec in 1989, meaning that it isn’t impossible but by no means as permanent a blackout as some doomsdayers fear. 

However, as the Covid-19 pandemic taught us, even the most unfathomable can sometimes become reality.

So what if this scenario were to hit Spain or the world as a whole?

Spain’s Environment Teresa Ribera flatly ruled out that this could affect Spain and defended that “we can rule it out from our future concerns” despite the fact that Europe’s electricity grid is linked from London all the way to Istanbul.

According to Ribera, the Spanish energy system “is almost an energy island and as we have almost double the installed power than what we use, the risk of a type of blackout due to a system failure in third countries is very limited”.

Madrid authorities are not so convinced by the national government’s stance, and in 2021 called for a nationwide action plan ready to be executed jointly across the regions in the event of a major blackout. 

In 2017, the Spanish Association of Civil Protection for Spatial Weather filed in the Spanish Congress a request to develop a national ‘anti-solar blackout’ plan but this somewhat bizarrely got passed on to the agricultural department and forgotten about. 

They ended up drawing up their own report studying what could be done in all manner of scenarios: accidents at power generation plants, scarcity of essential supplies (food, water, fuel and electricity), and meteorological events. 

After the freak snow storm that brought the Spanish capital to a standstill for several days that very year, it comes as no surprise that Madrid authorities want to be prepared in future.

Protocol measures went from establishing shelters, to a hierarchy of importance in terms of essential services and infrastructure, from the fire service to hospitals.

Specific recommendations for citizens included stocking up on electric generators, batteries, candles, analogue radio receivers and basic foods that do not require cold storage.

But the truth remains that there is no handbook available for Spain’s national government to execute in the event of a major blackout. 

What it has established recently is its SMS alert system, whereby everyone on the country’s phone network receives a message warning them of imminent dangers or risks. 

At this point in time, Spanish authorities simply don’t consider the risk of a major blackout to be worrisome enough to require a detailed action plan. 

The impossibility of Spain being completely off the grid is shared by those in charge of it – Red Eléctrica de España (REE) – but a Europe-wide blackout would undeniably still bring problems to most of the 48 million people living in this country.

READ ALSO: What are the chances of a big earthquake happening in Spain?

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