Who do I call when I want to talk to [a wind farm]?
Who do I call when I want to talk to [a wind farm]? My spin on Henry Kissinger’s iconic question. Electrical engineer, energy consultant, and professor of machine learning, Rodrigo de Marcos was an easy choice when deciding who I could interview about the case of renewable energy in Spain.
As an engineer, Rodrigo’s mission is to forecast energy prices, a task which is harder than it seems. He explained to me that despite an overarching sense that renewables energy prices will decrease, it is harder to actually project how much energy capacity will be added in certain time periods. When it can take up to four years for a new solar facility to be up and running, these projections matter a lot, especially to project investors.
What’s the deal?
Though my interest in energy had already led me to a rabbit hole of learning about Spain’s renewable energy development, I asked Rodrigo to walk me Spain’s progress. Since the inception of the Kyoto protocol, the first international treaty focused on reducing GHG emission, solar farms have become increasingly popular, making up around 10% of Spain’s energy production. Today, Spain has the second highest solar energy capacity in the European Union, and over the past five years, solar usage has soared threefold.
The Financial Times posted a compressive article on the aging wind farms of Spain the day after I interviewed Rodrigo. Their article mentions that due to having been ahead of the game with solar, many of Spain’s wind farms are of outdated technology. I followed up with Rodrigo to see if any clients have come to his consultancy with this concern, and he said that while none of their clients have approached them in regards to re-powering their farms, the consultancy does consider it in their long-term energy price forecasting. For me, it's interesting to consider how exactly repowering, which is expensive but which could increase efficiency by threefold, will affect the pricing in Spain.
The Future: challenges and opportunities
While I spoke with Rodrigo, a contagious smile stretched across his face. There was no doubt in my mind that he found his career rewarding. However, he is not purely optimistic about the future of renewable energy. We spoke about its shortcomings and the issue of EU policies wanting to phase out natural gas, as they are slowly but surely doing with coal. While CO2 emissions must decrease, renewable energy isn’t ready to stand on its own, and Rodrigo didn’t seem to think it ever will be. Think of Spain. Imagine a long period of no sun, or little wind, how may the system work without thermal energy production with natural gasses?
There isn’t much land left for wind, and considering Spain’s goal of increasing its renewable electricity generation from 50 to 73% by 2030, I wanted to test my assumptions for how Spain might tackle this. To my excitement, Rodrigo actually said that the Spanish government is really pushing for Spain to become a hub for green hydrogen. Given how many wind turbines exist in Spain, sometimes the grid can get overwhelmed when very windy days come along. When supply is high and demand is low, cables connecting wind farms to the grid get temporarily shut down, leaving energy to waste. However, with hydrogen, that unused wind supply could be used to power the electrolysis needed to make hydrogen. This would be a great opportunity seeing as the most favorable type of hydrogen energy is green – aka the electrolysis process is driven by renewable energy sources – and that hydrogen can actually be stored. Iberdrola, a Spanish renewable energy company, commissioned Europe’s largest green hydrogen plant that has been operational since 2022. To learn more about it, you can visit their linked website! And while there isn’t much land left for wind, Spain plans to have 1 to 3 GW of offshore wind energy by 2030, though this isn’t much when compared to its Iberian counterpart.
Looking towards the future, we discussed how energy prices might finally stabilize once countries rely on their own renewables, and a small amount of natural gas. Stable energy prices is something that the world has yet to see. But when this happens, much of the hype and excitement about investing in renewable energy will be gone. As much as this saddens me to think about, I would be proud to live to see the day where renewable energy is taken for granted, and is not a luxury of developed nations.
