Spain’s Association of Electric Power Companies (Aelec) warned that most of the country’s power grid is saturated, hindering the economic development of the nation.
To fix the problem and enable new connections massive investments will be needed, it said yesterday.
According to data compiled by Aelec, 83.4 per cent of the nodes in Spain’s electricity grid are saturated, preventing new connections from being made, effectively blocking the integration of new electricity demand.
This revelation, drawn from Aelec’s capacity map analysis, underscores a growing bottleneck, a consequence of Spain’s headlong rush into renewable energy without adequately preparing its ageing infrastructure.
The saturated nodes means the grid cannot handle new connections, whether from households, industries, or the flood of renewable energy projects championed by policymakers.
Spain’s grid is stretched to its limits, with solar farms and wind projects — often built in remote areas with weak connections — now stalled or rejected because the infrastructure is not capable of handling the demand.
Spain added 7.3 GW of new photovoltaic and wind power capacity in 2024, the highest annual increase ever recorded, making solar the leading technology in installed capacity. The necessary changes on the grid, though, have been lacking.
Aelec called the publication a “milestone of transparency and efficiency for demand” because it offered, for the first time, homogeneous information.
The association estimates that addressing grid saturation requires billions of euros in investments to upgrade distribution nodes, expand high-voltage transmission lines and deploy digital grid technologies.
While precise figures for the required investment were not specified in the report, the scale suggests a multi-year, multi-billion-euro effort.
“Without these conditions, it will not be possible to connect industry, housing, storage or electric mobility, missing out on the potential of renewable energies and limiting the economic growth and competitiveness that electrification can bring to Spain,” Aelec said in a statement.
The country is executing an aggressive push toward renewable energy and decarbonisation but is facing increasing difficulties. Earlier this year, it suffered a mega black-out that many experts put down to a reliance on renewable energy. The government refused to acknowledge that.
Since the blackout, Spain has ramped up gas use for power generation, leaving its electricity grid more reliant on stable conventional gas plants, according to the network operator Enagás.
Experts have warned for years that Spain’s grid, built for a centralised fossil fuel system, was ill-suited for the decentralised, intermittent nature of wind and solar power. Yet, successive governments, egged on by European Union mandates and “green” lobbying, doubled down on renewable targets without matching investments in grid capacity.
Most of the costs to update the grid will end up with the taxpayers and the electricity bills of the consumers.
While Spain and Portugal are slowly recovering from the electricity blackout that put both countries to a standstill, experts have been pointing out that renewable energy might be the main cause of the problem. https://t.co/NdHa9tBpeB
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) April 29, 2025
