Companies and industry are positioning themselves to opt for electricity supply points, awaiting Aagesen's opening this year.

The industrial sector and new business ventures are taking positions in anticipation of the prospect that soon, before the end of the year, the Ministry for Ecological Transition will finally announce tenders for access to the electricity grid to meet demand. To participate, bidders must have expressed interest in connecting at a specific point on the grid—a specific node—and in recent months this is what they have been doing increasingly , making their intention clear. This is forcing Red Eléctrica to increasingly identify nodes reserved for tender, even with projects that are sometimes passed off as self-consumption projects when in reality they are much larger.

This phenomenon is reflected in the latest monthly report prepared for its members by APPA Renovables, the largest association in the sector. The report for June showed that there were 57 nodes "reserved for demand competition," that is, positions on the electricity grid that Red Eléctrica has had to reserve because several projects have requested the right to connect to them. This is four more than in May, and in July the number will grow again, more significantly, to 70 nodes.

Since 2023, when there is more than one applicant to connect to a specific grid position for supply, Red Eléctrica must identify them, and a competition must be held among the candidates. In addition to meeting the requirements established in each case by the Ministry headed by Third Vice President Sara Aagesen , there is a prior criterion: the participants must have requested access to the demand at this specific point in advance. In other words, they must be in the queue before the competition is announced, and this need for anticipation is what is causing the accumulation effect that APPA Renovables has been detecting for months.

According to the sector, applicants for access to the electricity supply do not know how much capacity will be available at each node and this is causing them to also submit their requests using channels for which they might not be chosen , especially passing off larger projects as self-consumption projects, which will also be reserved 10% of access to the grid from 2023.

Thus, according to APPA's June report, 83 applications have been submitted for the 57 nodes reserved for tender, totaling 73,513 MW. Of these, 15 are for storage, another four are for increasing consumption capacity at an existing facility, and the majority—64 for 19,300 MW—are for self-consumption. The report only considers applications for at least 5 MW, which is already a narrow margin because its next document, corresponding to July and due to be published in mid-August, lists the total number of applications—for any power—as 1,126.

The sector explains this phenomenon in two ways. First, the demand-side competition launched by the Ministry last month for eight nodes in six regions , specifically aimed at projects with European funding that they would lose if they don't first gain access to the grid, has spurred the industrial sector, already awaiting the second reason, the expectation that Aagesen will finally launch grid access competitions for demand before the end of the year.

Without having to wait for the growing number of applications to participate in on-demand access competitions, in 2023 the Ministry already attempted to prevent a "bubble" in applications for the distribution network, as occurred years ago in the transmission network —by developers and for the generation, not consumption, of electricity. To this end, it introduced the requirement not only for the demand side to present a guarantee of 40 euros per kW of connection granted —which would be lost if their project had not signed an electricity contract within five years—but also, before then, of 25 euros per kW requested just to participate in the competitions.

Compliance with the criteria for participation—or increased chances—in the tenders will come later. In the tender announced in early July for eight hubs in the Basque Country, Castilla-La Mancha, Aragon, Andalusia, Catalonia, and Galicia, there are three, and among them one priority project that will receive "preferential treatment." This relates to the greenhouse gas emissions that will be avoided by projects that supply this electricity, which largely involve electrifying industrial processes. Furthermore, the Ministry will provide incentives for larger investments over smaller ones and for projects that are expected to materialize sooner.

Applicants must pass this first criterion related to emissions to access the scoring system based on the other two, which will reward those who require more investment and those who go to materialize sooner.

The industry calls for an end to the "blockade"

This increase in nodes reserved for tenders, since Red Eléctrica has confirmed that there is more than one applicant, is "very much in line with the context that we are seeing in the Alliance, in the case of the distribution network [for consumption, for supply] in 2024 60,000 MW of demand were requested and only six were granted, others were rejected and others went to tender," says Alejandro Labanda , spokesperson for the Green and Connected Spain Alliance, which brings together representatives of the industrial, technological and energy sectors and closely monitors the opportunities for the country's industrial and economic development through electrification, for which having access to the electricity grid is key.

Aside from the data showing a growing interest in positioning themselves to gain access to the grid, Labanda points out that "what we are seeing is an underlying trend in which there is an interest in developing industrial projects in Spain due to its competitive [electricity] prices and a situation of blockage , of a logjam in the granting of access capacity to the grid through demand, which is precisely what we in the Alliance advocate must be expedited."

Power generators call for clear criteria for greater grid access

For its part, Red Eléctrica announced in June that 386 nodes of the electricity grid were reserved for generation tenders , i.e., tenders in which two or more companies or developers of wind farms where electricity is produced are willing to compete so that it can be introduced into the system. In total, they have a capacity of 162,300 MW, of which 173,266 MW are not available for installing storage—one of the priority technologies currently—and another 1,400 MW are granted access capacity for self-consumption.

The renewable energy sector also hopes that the date is finally approaching when the Ministry will put these nodes out to tender, although it is aware that the demand tenders will happen first. While they wait, they are asking Aagesen for a list of "appropriate" and "objective" criteria for their activity, beyond the "relatively simple" ones established for the demand tender. They also want them to be general and not "tailor-made" like those the sector criticizes for having been drawn up for the just transition nodes , where grid access was left unchecked due to the closure of thermal power plants.

In this regard, the Wind Energy Business Association (AEE) is preparing a proposal for the vice president to delve deeper into the four already established ones—economic, temporal, technological, and socio-environmental—to fine-tune with others such as whether to promote the creation of wind and photovoltaic farms—thanks to their access to the grid —in areas where there is more space but perhaps also more farms or places with less social opposition but where others are more suitable because there is more wind or more sun.

"What we want are public criteria, and above all, objective ones , so that projects can be properly evaluated and compared," they emphasize in the renewable sector, aware of the difficulties of "buying one company with another" to determine who can have access to the grid and who can't.