Thursday, March 28

Catalonia plans to occupy 2.5% of the territory with wind turbines and solar panels


The energy revolution is already underway in Catalonia. The main conclusions of the plan planned by the Government is that it will be possible to reach a energy supply based on renewable energies and the closure of nuclear power plants in 2050, but for this it will be necessary to increase generation, reduce consumption by more than 50% and occupy at least 2.5% of the Catalan territory with wind and photovoltaic installations. This occupation will be equivalent to some 80,000 hectares that is currently undeveloped land (with some 3,000 hectares corresponding to roofs with solar panels). The ‘consellera’ of Climate Action, Food and Rural Agenda, Teresa Jordà, who presented this Friday the conclusions of the study carried out by the Institut Català d’Energia (ICAEN), stressed that the climate emergency requires urgency and policies capable of combining energy efficiency with a clean Catalan energy model agreed with the territory. In this model designed by the Government, electrification will go from accounting for 25% of electricity generation to 76% of the total.

In that drawing of a new power generation system, Jordà recognized that the more than 500,000 photovoltaic installations planned for 2050 “will not be enough” to compensate for the closure of nuclear power plants and face electrification, so it is necessary to take on a “giant challenge” both in investments and in changing habits of consumption. In his opinion, the population will have to assume changes, also in mobility, but also in the landscape. Along these lines, he believed that the planned Tramuntana offshore wind farm off the coast of Girona in external waters is essential and will play a major role in this plan to multiply installed electrical power by 18 between 2017 and 2050. This plan provides for the installation of offshore wind turbines capable of producing a thousand megawatts of power.

The director of ICAEN, Martha Morera, is one of the architects of this roadmap that encompasses a total of 20 energy strategies that relate the expected evolution of demand and future energy needs, taking into account that the analysis must be adapted to the technological advances that are taking place. According to this plan, foreign energy dependency will go from the current 94.2% to 6.7% in 2050, not counting non-energy uses of energy. The analysis calculates that it will be necessary to install an additional 12,000 MW of renewable energy in 2030 and up to almost 62,000 MW in 2050 to achieve a fully decarbonized electricity system, a figure that will require the occupation of that 2.5% of the territory for energy uses. The areas of transport (-50.6%) and domestic (-34.2%) are the ones that will lead the greatest reduction in energy consumption.

Distribution of facilities in the territory

The consensus of the territories will be key in this energy transition so that the rural environment does not become the only one to contribute to the electricity generation required by large population centers. The Government will also have to deal with the opposition of the municipalities on the coast of Girona, which oppose the installation of large wind turbines, due to the effects they may have in terms of nautical tourism or fishing. In this line, the Government has always defended that electricity generation be embodied in a “distributed” model, both from a geographical and business point of view.

The theoretical clean, indigenous, efficient and competitive Catalan energy system is possible, said Jordà, as long as different strategies that require less consumption and greater generation of renewable energies are applied and promoted. In addition, more and more consumption will become electric, with the aim of taking advantage of the greater flexibility of the electrical system to introduce renewable energies and reduce polluting emissions. Electric mobility, the air conditioning of buildings with heat pump systems or the electrification of part of the industrial processes will add in this direction. Thus, if in 2017 the degree of electrification of the energy demand was 24.8%, by 2030 it is expected to be 34.2% and by 2050 it will increase to 76.4%. In fact, electricity demand is expected to multiply by 2.3 in the 2017-2050 period, until it practically reaches 100 TWh per year.

Energy saving and efficiency

The combination of the energy saving and efficiency measures and the electrification process will mean that the final energy intensity in 2030 will be reduced by 19.3% compared to the current one, while this reduction will be 57% by the year 2050. This means that will decouple economic growth from the evolution of energy consumption, and that in 2050 Catalonia will consume less than half the energy it needs today to produce a product or provide a service.

According to the calculations carried out, by 2030 it will be necessary to incorporate up to 12,000 MW of renewable energy (5,000 MW of wind power and 7,000 MW of photovoltaic energy), a figure that should grow to almost 62,000 MW in 2050, 18 times the power currently installed. These figures should allow, on the one hand, to face the planned closure of nuclear power plants, and on the other hand, make wind energy account for 50% of the country’s electricity generation and photovoltaic energy, 43% in the year 2050.

The installation of more than 11,000 MW of photovoltaic installations in buildings and 2,600 MW of photovoltaic energy in other anthropized spaces has been planned, which will contribute up to 40% of the total solar energy generated in Catalonia. Overall, by 2050, around 500,000 electrical energy installations on roofs and roofs will come into service, many of them associated with self-consumption and distributed generation systems, which will allow up to 65% of their total potential to be used.

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According to the analysis carried out, the growing use of electric batteries and hydroelectric pumping systems and a different management of hydroelectric plants with reservoirs should make it possible to guarantee the balance between supply and demand every hour of the year.

Hydrogen produced from renewable energies will play a significant role in the target scenario. Forecasts indicate that this energy vector will be present as a raw material in certain industrial processes that require hydrogen and, selectively, as a fuel in those energy sectors and uses that are difficult to electrify (maritime transport and heavy road freight transport, ovens very high temperature industrial). In this sense, it is estimated that the production of hydrogen from renewable sources as fuel and/or raw material in the energy, transport and industry sectors will be almost 95,000 tons in 2050.



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