On January 6, it is
traditional that Spanish children receive
gifts from the three wise men, a day far
more anticipated than the arrival of Santa
Claus. The most feared gift used to be coal,
a sign that the children had behaved badly
over the past year. Coal is also a bad sign
for the environment, because it’s the largest
source of CO2 to the atmosphere and a major
driver of global warming. But happily in
Spain, things are changing.
In the morning of the
three wise men, while children all over
Spain opened their gifts and thousands of
new electronic gadgets were plugged into
the grid, none of the nation’s electricity
was coming from coal. Over the whole day,
three-quarters of Spain’s electricity was
met from renewable sources while coal barely
reached 4% of supply.
Annual data from Red
Electrica, a major Spanish power transmission
company, confirms the unstoppable rise of
clean energies in Spain. In 2010, renewables
supplied 35% of all Spain’s electricity,
higher than ever before, and even though
overall power consumption was higher than
2009. Wind power alone supplied 16%, twice
as much power as coal and on very windy
days, wind power peaked at over half the
national power consumption.
The great beneficiary
of increased renewable supply was the environment.
Thanks to renewables, coal-fired power dropped
by 34% last year and gas-fired power dropped
17%, with 22 gas projects being cancelled.
This meant CO2 emissions from Spain’s power
system fell by 20% last year. Our renewables
were also able to cover for nuclear power
plant failures, incluiding those from the
great advocate of nuclear energy, France.
For the first time, France became a net
importer of electricity from Spain, something
only possible thanks to renewables.
The economic benefits
of Spain’s renewables are also impressive.
As shown in this report by the Spanish Association
of Renewable Energy Producers, renewables
made electricity production cheaper, reducing
total cost by € 4,830 million in 2009 (more
than covering the payments received in the
feed-in tariff incentive program), they
contributed € 8,525 million to national
GDP and were worth €3,042 million in exports.
Despite the government making cuts to the
highly-successful feed-in tariff incentive
(the cuts costing Spain 20,000 jobs) renewables
still provide jobs for 100,000 people in
Spain.
So we can be happy that
Spain’s target of 30% of electricity from
renewables in 2010 has been easily surpassed.
In fact, the 2020 target from Spanish Parliament
of 35.5% power from renewables has almost
been reached already, showing our political
representatives’ lack of vision, or their
caving in to lobbying from utilities and
the whole dirty energy sector, who don’t
want the impressive success of renewables
to continue.
In Greenpeace we shall
work in 2011 for not just Spain, but around
the world, to acknowledge that the horizon
that we must point to is no other than 100%
renewable.
