Spanish government approves roadmap to promote offshore wind projects

Spanish government approves roadmap to promote offshore wind projects

On Friday, December 10, the Council of Ministers approved a roadmap that will promote Spain towards industrial leadership in the development of offshore wind energy solutions on floating platforms.

Prepared by the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, this teaxt defines a strategy with 20 lines of action. Its objective is to reach between 1 and 3GW of floating offshore wind power by 2030.

This is 40 per cent of the objective that the European Union has marked for the end of the decade. Spain has also proposed to produce up to 60MW of other energy from the sea, in the pre-commercial phase, by harnessing waves or tides.

During the press conference, Isabel Rodriguez, the Government spokeswoman, explained, “It is a very ambitious plan, that consolidates the leadership of our country in wind technology research from the sea. Seven of the 27 patents that exist for this technology are Spanish, I think it is a reason to feel proud as a country”.

The Government’s aspiration with this roadmap is that all this technological development translates into industrial development for the generation of clean energy. It can also lead to the creation of 40,000 new qualified jobs throughout the implementation of the entire roadmap.

The first phase is to position Spain as the European reference centre for the design. This entails the scaling and demonstration of these new technologies, reinforcing the test platforms, and offering the best and fastest environment to test new prototypes.

€200 million euros will be allocated for this from the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, to finance projects in the testing and R&D phase, up to 2023. At the same time, the needs of the port infrastructure will be evaluated, where between 500 and €1,000 million must be invested to cover the new logistics needs.

A second step will address the promotion of industrial capacities for the development of these projects. In this phase, it involves focusing on synergies with already leading sectors such as naval, iron, and steel, or those with experience in offshore wind energy.

Sustainability will be a central pillar of the development of renewable energies in the sea. In addition to an orderly deployment, thanks to the Maritime Space Management Plans, now in public information, the deployment of these technologies will be used to incorporate marine environment monitoring systems. They will facilitate their conservation, and improve knowledge of the interactions and conditions of the different activities, as reported by lavanguardia.com.

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