Spain generates half electricity from renewables

Green Politics

Last week Spain generated nearly half of its electricity from renewable sources - the UK currently generates just 5.5%

It’s a popular myth that renewables just cannot deliver that much power.

London Mayor Boris Johnson has joked about “crucifying our landscape with wind farms which, even when they are in motion, would barely pull the skin off a rice pudding.” When he was Energy Minister John Hutton told Labour Conference in 2008, “No coal and no nuclear equals no lights, no power, no future.”

The conventional wisdom in Westminster is that renewable technologies are tomorrow’s not today’s technologies – that they’re a good idea in principle but just cannot deliver that much energy. This is a point reiterated by energy bosses, like Tony Hayward of BP who has called renewables “a valuable option for the future.”

So consider this:

On Friday, for the first time ever, there was a moment when a nearly half of Spain’s electricity came from renewable sources. This graph shows how Spain generated a whopping 45.9 per cent of all its electricity from renewable sources: eolica (wind), hidraulica (hydropower), and resto reg. esp. (biomass and solar). CO2 emissions dropped accordingly.

With such a big green energy section, no wonder that by 2006, according to Deutsche Bank, the Spanish were already employing 35,000 in their wind sector and 35,591 jobs in their solar sector. Meanwhile, Germany already produces more than 15 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources, and aims to raise this to 30 per cent by 2020 and 45 per cent by 2030.

Despite having greater renewable resource potential than Spain, the UK currently generates just 5.5 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources. (Renewable Energy Strategy, DECC, Page 10.)

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18 Responses to “Spain generates half electricity from renewables”

  1. blind steve

    Also, FYI, Spain has a _TARGET_ of _30%_ renewbales by 2010. If you ant something to cheer lead about, consider that the world record for windpower was indeed achieved in Spain with a whopping 43% of demand being satisfied by wind one day last November.

    Of course when demand ramps up or the wind dies, you need to kick in your gas turbine or nuclear capacity to smooth the grid. Which is why the totals look the way they do.

  2. blind steve

    Right, with you, brush up rusty spanish, these are not annual totals, these are percentages of daily demand satisfied by type. See above, quite frankly. All very well when it’s windy.

    Look at today’s graph. Wind drops, back to the gas turbines. Still good though. What you need is annual graph.

    Which is why I got confused, because at the bottom there you have compared a single daily figure with UK and Germany ANNUAL totals, which is wrong.

  3. Joss Garman

    You’re right, should have made that clear. I’ll see if I can dig out the annual total since I’m confident it’d still be a whopping figure…

  4. Joss Garman

    It was 14.9% in 2005, and its a fast growing sector. http://www.energy.eu/renewables/factsheets/2008_res_sheet_spain_en.pdf

  5. blind steve

    Still be much higher than ours, yeah.

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