Approximately 450km north of Extremadura, in north-western Spain, the region of Castile and León was the country’s largest wind energy producer in 2023. Like the rest of the country, project development has benefited from a historically well-networked electricity grid, which has been built out and upgraded over time.
The region also undertook some early planning efforts to guide project locations. In 1999, as the sector began to develop, work was undertaken by the autonomous community to understand the location of the wind resource, transmission infrastructure and environmentally sensitive areas. As a result, the government was able to provide guidance to industry regarding the areas that would potentially yield the best projects – but also the areas that they needed to avoid development in. In meeting with the Department of Planning and Promotion of Energy Projects Regional at EREN (the Public Energy Entity of Castile and León), there is a sense of pride that the region was able to get in front the curve with this planning work. Whilst it has evolved over time, as the wind energy sector, and electricity grid have developed it has also potentially avoided some of the pitfalls seen elsewhere.
As the onshore wind industry started to emerge at the end of last century, government planners in Castile and León sought to get out in front of the development. They developed two maps: an environmental plan, and a wind resource and transmission plan. The former identified ‘red zones’ which were environmentally sensitive and needed to be protected. The latter showed where the key wind resources were. By overlaying the two, they were able to develop a series of scenarios for the sector envisaging conservative, medium and aggressive project development and prioritising areas for project development on that basis. Whilst there have been updates over time, as turbine efficiency has improved (generally increasing the locations with a viable wind resource) and as the electricity grid has been built out further, the maps are still in use over a quarter of a century later.
Over that time, there have been several shifts and challenges; from 2000-2010 it was largely centred around grid connection. From 2010 onwards, stronger environmental movement increased scrutiny of the ‘red zones’. More recently, it is the need for energy storage, coupled with social impact considerations. If you were to repeat this process today, the map might be more complex, as you would probably overlay prime agricultural land, fire or flood-prone areas, key cultural heritage elements and possibly even landscapes that you wished to protect from visual amenity impacts.
Because of the timing of the development of the region, many projects were developed before serious consideration of social impact was given to renewable energy projects. As such, like much of the renewable energy sector in Spain, the community benefits tend to be limited. Instead, landholders and local governments have historically been the primary beneficiaries these projects, particularly when that hilltop land is owned by the local government. There is an argument that directing the benefits to the local governments allows for broader benefit-sharing, rather than concentrating community benefits to the immediate vicinity of the project. This runs a little counter to some of the Scottish thinking which tends to see community benefit funds increasingly owned and run by community-led groups.
Nevertheless, the process has worked reasonable well for the autonomous community. Development was also helped by the fact that wind energy is more readily able to co-exist with agriculture than solar power, but also that much of the wind was across hilltops and ridgelines, rather than in the more productive valleys. Given the scale of the development, environmental and visual amenity concerns persist, although the latter are tempered by the relatively sparse rural population. That said, it is pointed out to me that if only 5% of Castile and León’s land was utilised for renewables, it could produce about 115GW of electricity; nearly as much as Spain currently produces from all sources. The lesson here is that there is more than enough land to need to use good farmland for renewable energy.
There are many examples of turbines sitting in fields of crops or pasture, but often they appear to be sited so that they are along the perimeter, to both minimise the impact on any agricultural land use, but probably also provide easier access for maintenance. And it might just be me, but the turbines in this part of the country do little to detract from the rolling hills and farmland. In truth, there are some wind farm areas that are really quite picturesque.
