WIND ENERGY IN GALICIA

Galicia is a pioneer in regulating the use of wind to produce electricity. Wind energy has developed so widely over the last decades in the Galician territory that it has converted Galicia into a wind power. This process is a consequence of Galicia’s rich wind energy that has led to the installation over 4,000 wind turbines across many forests in over 100 municipalities associated to more than 150 wind farms.

In this section, the Wind Observatory of Galicia shares information about the geolocation of wind farms, installed power, production volumes and other indicators of wind development in Galicia.

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Wind energy has been widely developed over the last decades in the Galician territory. This process took place thanks to the wind resource present in many areas of Galicia. However, this great implantation was also due to the design and approval of a regulatory framework favoring the implementation of wind farms. Wind farms, wind turbines and associated infrastructures have therefore been implemented throughout many of Galicia's forests since 1995. More than 3,300 MW have been installed during this period of wind development in Galicia. Most of them were put into operation within the period from 1997 to the end of 2008.

Figure: Dynamics of operating wind power in Galicia (MW)

Source: SIDWEG

We believe that the current power in operation will tend to rise given the recent reactivation of wind power in Galicia and the number of wind farms currently under construction along with those pending administrative processing.

Available information concerning the distribution of this power throughout the territory allows us to conduct an analysis of operating wind power by province. Noteworthy in this sense are the provinces of Lugo and A Coruña because most wind farms approved for operation in the Galician territory, with over 1,000 MW (in each one), are concentrated there.

Table: Provincial distribution of the number of wind farms of installed power as at March 2019

Source: Energy Institute of Galicia

The implantation of wind farms is an business activity and, as such, the income framework and its related economic circumstances are important to understand wind development.  Certainly, a key element in understanding the expansion of this wind economic activity is linked to the business generated from the production of electricity through the use of wind power, a resource located in the rural lands of Galicia, as common properties of Communities of Neighborhoods of private owners and, to a lesser extent, public property. The invoicing of the Galician wind farms surpassed 700 million euro in the year 2013. The following figure shows the total estimated invoicing for Galician wind farms:

Figure: Estimated invoicing for wind farms in Galicia (€)

Source: Self elaborated based on the monthly report of energy sales from renewable energy sources, cogeneration and waste by the Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia.

As seen in the figure, the global invoicing of Galician wind farms steadily advances until 2004 as a result of a strong continued growth up to the year 2008, when it reaches its first peak. After that, the trend is downward.  However, average prices are higher than the average of the previous period until its highest invoicing year, 2013. 2014 and 2016 register a sharp fall. This situation soon began to change. 2017 marked the beginning of the current recovery in invoicing when the average sales price exceeded 80 euro/MWh.

The invoicing of each wind power station not only depends on the remunerative context and the average sale price of the production (measured in MWh). It also depends on the efficiency of the facilities, measured in Equivalent Production Hours. Some places have more wind times than others. In Galicia some wind farms have over 4,000 hours of estimated operation per year.

Wind power is not distributed homogeneously throughout the territory. Some geographic spaces concentrate a great deal of the installed operating power. These places correspond to the territories in which the “Wind Atlas of Spain” determines the highest potential wind production. As seen in the following table, most of the Galician wind turbines are located in the municipalities located in the mountains of the “Galician Dorsal” and the coastal areas of the province of A Coruña. Particularly noteworthy is the wind density in municipalities like O Valadouro, Abadín or Ourol in the Serra do Xistral that have hundreds of wind turbines. The municipality of Muras heads this list with a total of 381 operating wind turbines.

Table: Municipal distribution of the number of wind turbines in 2019.

Source: ORDER of 17 December 2018 regulating the distribution criteria and establishing the regulatory base and the call for subsidies in non-competitive and competitive lines of the Environmental Compensation Fund for the year 2019, both Individually and through a shared management system targeting local Galician entities.

The average power of wind turbines in Galicia grew rapidly throughout the first years of wind development. However, it has remained constant since the stoppage in 2008. Its recent growth is fruit of the first repowering of wind farms. The average power of the wind farms of Galicia is likely to grow significantly over the coming years given the unitary power of wind turbines in process (3 MW per wind turbine in many cases and up to 4.5 MW in some concrete projects),.

Figure: Dynamics of average power by operating wind turbine in the Galician territory. MW