The Spanish Ministry of Ecological Transition (MITECO) has allocated €85 million (US$91 million) to develop 51 renewable energy generation and storage projects on the Canary Islands.
The projects will add 92MW of generation and 186MWh of energy storage capacity across the Canary archipelago, though the majority (30) of the proposed projects will be deployed on Gran Canaria. A total of 11 projects will be deployed on Fuerteventura, eight on Tenerife and two on La Gomera. MITECO did not provide a project-by-project breakdown of the generation technology types, though it said it would ‘promote’ solar PV installations.
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Funding will be portioned out from Spain’s Recovery, Transition and Resilience Plan (PERTE), a €163 billion EU-funded scheme to support the renewable energy and digitisation transitions in Spain. MITECO said that the PERTE has a specific fund set aside for sustainable energy investments on Spanish islands, designed to support their relatively isolated energy systems. Renewable energy penetration into the Canaries’ energy systems has been meagre so far, and the islands have mostly relied on fossil fuels for their energy supply.
To this end, the projects will particularly prioritise energy storage deployments at new, repowered or existing power stations. In its announcement, MITECO said that the isolated nature of the Canary Islands’ electricity networks allows it to test the use of storage as a tool for integrating storage into a ‘100% decarbonised system’.
The financial aid will cover between 40% and 75% of the investments into the projects.
In June, Spain was one of a number of EU member states which updated its National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP). In the revised plan, MITECO said that it would target 75GW of deployed solar PV capacity by the end of the decade.