Spain buys 49.9 GWh of pumped hydro, two projects on mine drainage
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readSpain has awarded €265 million (about $302 million) to eleven pumped hydro storage projects totalling almost 4.1 GW and 49.9 GWh, across two rounds of its Boralmac programme resolved between 2024 and 2026. The projects sit in seven autonomous communities, cover both new facilities and schemes built on existing infrastructure, and are expected to be complete by 2035. The reporting is by Pilar Sánchez Molina.
The first round, resolved in July 2024, handed out its full €100 million to four projects with roughly 2 GW of turbine capacity and 28.85 GWh of storage. The largest single award, €44.9 million, went to the BOREAL project at Alcántara in Extremadura for a new José María de Oriol II plant using the existing Alcántara II and Cedillo reservoirs.
Two awards in Castilla y León do something less usual: they use drainage water from abandoned mines. Navaleo at Torre del Bierzo received €35.3 million and the Velilla del Río Carrión project in Palencia €10.7 million.
What it means
Put the energy figure next to the money and the shape of the decision is clear. 49.9 GWh for €265 million of public subsidy is roughly €5.3 per kWh of subsidised capacity - and that is subsidy, not build cost, so the actual capital behind these projects is a multiple of it. No battery programme delivers duration at that leverage, because pumped hydro is not competing on cost per kWh of hardware; it is competing on hours. A system with large solar output and a steep evening ramp needs storage measured in hours rather than in minutes, and 49.9 GWh against 4.1 GW is about twelve hours of discharge - a different product from a grid battery, and the reason a 2035 completion date is tolerable for this and would be absurd for a BESS procurement.
The mine-drainage projects are the detail worth following, and not for novelty. Pumped hydro's binding constraint in most of Europe is not technology or capital but sites: two reservoirs, a head difference, and a permitting path through communities who did not ask for a reservoir. Abandoned mine workings quietly solve parts of all three - the voids and water are already there, the land is industrial rather than pristine, and the local argument starts from a closed mine rather than a flooded valley. If Navaleo and Velilla del Río Carrión deliver, the interesting number will not be their capacity but their permitting timeline compared with the greenfield awards in the same round. That is the comparison that would tell every coal region in Europe whether it is sitting on storage.