Spain consults on handing out 11 GW of reserved just-transition grid capacity
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readSpain's Ministry for the Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge (MITECO), through its Institute for Just Transition (ITJ), has opened two public consultations on how to allocate up to 11 GW of grid access capacity reserved at just-transition nodes - connection points in areas losing coal plants, mines or other industry. Both consultations run until 8 October, pv magazine reported on 24 September. The capacity is meant for renewable generation and energy storage.
The two procedures differ in method. The first covers 15 nodes across A Coruña, Almería, Asturias, Burgos, Cádiz, León, Palencia and Puertollano, and the ITJ proposes a simple competitive process in which capacity goes to applicants in the order their applications arrive. Projects would still have to meet technical requirements, pass environmental assessment and commit to socioeconomic measures in the transition area. The second covers the Guardo 220 kV and Velilla 400 kV nodes in Palencia, where a market consultation held from April to June found significant interest, particularly from reversible (pumped) hydropower projects. There the ITJ proposes a tender, set up by a ministerial order, that would rank projects on socioeconomic and environmental criteria as well as grid-connection requirements.
What it means
The split shows a regulator allocating grid access by different rules depending on how contested it is. Where demand is modest, arrival order is cheap and fast. Where more projects want a node than it can take, Spain chooses to compare them, and the criteria it names - local jobs and environmental impact - are not the same as "whoever pays most" or "whoever is most advanced". That makes the Guardo-Velilla outcome a test case for whether long-duration storage can win a scarce connection on public-interest grounds rather than on price alone.
It also sits squarely in the European debate about queues. First come, first served is exactly the rule other countries are abandoning because it rewards speculative applications; Spain keeps it for the less contested nodes but attaches obligations that make a placeholder application costly. Developers interested in the 15 first-come nodes should read the draft conditions closely before 8 October: if socioeconomic commitments are binding and enforced, they will filter the queue more effectively than the arrival rule suggests.