According to the latest statistics published by Spain’s electricity grid
operator, Red Eléctrica de España (REE), solar PV electricity generation in
June, July and August provided 3.87% of the Spanish peninsula's power generation
mix.
If
you add the 2.9% contributed to the energy mix by the solar thermal
installations, mainland Spain covered 6.77% of its power needs in the summer
from the sun. This is down 1.46% on last year’s summer statistics when the solar
technologies had jointly generated 8.23% of the peninsula’s electrical
energy.
A
bit more positive is the fact that in the first eight months of the year, gross
demand in Spain reached 167,837 GWh, a figure 3.3% higher than in the same
period in 2014. “After having factored in the influence of the seasonal and
working patterns, electrical energy demand was 1.3% higher than that registered
in the same period last year,” REE added.
Excess
capacity together with depressed demand ranks at the top of Spain's energy
sector troubles, including the solar PV sector.
Meanwhile,
Spain's electricity generation from January to August consisted of 21.6% nuclear
power, 19.6% wind power, 19.1% coal, 12.3% hydro, 10.1% co-generation
technologies, 9.7% combined cycle gas, 3.3% solar PV, 2.5% solar thermal and
1.8% other thermal renewable technologies.
The
"sun tax"
The Spanish PV sector's top summer concern, however,
remains the proposed "sun tax" relating to the regulation of the
self-consumption systems. The government has published a draft self-consumption
law according to which solar PV system owners will be taxed for the power they
produce, even if it is solely for their own use and not fed into the grid.
Spain’s PV sector calls it the "sun tax.”
The
Spanish Photovoltaic Union (UNEF) told pv
magazine that the draft
self-consumption law is currently under consideration by the Spanish Council of
State and that Spain’s opposition parties have signed a declaration saying that
if the government publishes the law with the sun tax provision, they will repeal
it if and when it is their turn to govern. All of Spain’s main photovoltaic
associations, trade unions and non-governmental organizations have also signed
this document, said UNEF.
According
to the draft law, UNEF added, some small sized domestic PV projects under 10 kW
for specific areas (e.g. the Balearic Islands) will be exempted but only for a
temporary period.
You
can’t stop the future
“It
is clear the energy policy of the conservative party currently ruling the
country does not want to encourage distributed generation, net metering or
self-consumption schemes," José Donoso, UNEF’s general director, told pv
magazine. "Instead, it clearly supports the energy model of the last
century where few, very powerful utilities dominate the electricity market. The
Spanish government does not want more actors participating in the electricity
market.”
Spain’s domestic
PV sector is now waiting for the results of the
general election to be held in December and most vitally for the energy policy
of the new government. Nevertheless, Donoso said, “all efforts to stop the
future will eventually fail.”
Technology
changes rapidly and the change it brings comes from the bottom-up, Donoso added.
What UNEF is worried about is “Spain loosing the opportunity to embrace the
distributed energy revolution we see unfolding in other European countries, and
therefore the domestic
PV sector also missing the
opportunity to develop the skills and the know-how to manage the new energy
systems.”
The abolition of Spain’s feed-in tariff
(FIT) scheme in 2013 and a new way to
calculate the income for
solar PV projects introduced last year has frozen the
installation activity in Spain and, as a result, the idle
Spanish solar PV sector had
invested a lot of hope in the self-consumption regulations.
