Skip to content

Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind!

Record Spanish Wind Energy

Ok, not all the time, but last weekend at 5:50am on Sunday morning (8th Nov) Spain set a new record, hitting 53.7% of its energy requirements being supplied by wind energy.

As you can see from the graph above, the amount of electricity being supplied by wind, the light green portion of the graph, doesn’t go below 30% at any point in the 24 hours and is closer to between 40-50% for most of the time!

These are figures the world’s most ambitious countries are targeting hitting by 2020, at the earliest!

Notice also on the graph that the contribution from coal (the red band) during this period is in the low single digits, never rising above 6.4%.

And finally notice also that for a lot of the period significant amounts of generation is below the 0MW line – this occurs when the electricity is being either stored using pumped hydro storage, or being exported for sale on the international markets.

The Guardian reporting on this quoted José Donoso, head of the Spanish Wind Energy Association

“We think that we can keep growing and go from the present 17GW megawatts to reach 40GW in 2020,” he told El País newspaper.

Windfarms have this month outperformed other forms of electricity generation in Spain, beating gas into second place and producing 80% more than the country’s nuclear plants.

Experts estimate that by the end of the year, Spain will have provided a quarter of its energy needs with renewables, with wind leading the way, followed by hydroelectric power and solar energy.

The graph above is taken from the site of the Spanish grid operator Red Electrica de España (REE).

The REE website has highly detailed and extremely interactive infographics produced using Adobe’s Flex software:
Real-time (and historic) demand, along with generation structure and CO2 emissions
Real-time (and historic) structure of electricity generation (the graph above is taken from this page) and
Demand curves over intervals of time

by-sa
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Posted in renewables.

Tagged with , , , , , .

182 comments

By Tom Raftery – November 14, 2009

1 Comment 243 Tweets 35 Comments

182 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.

  4. Patrick M. says

    Very misleading headline!”Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind ….. for a few nano-seconds!”

    What percent of energy over the past YEAR was generated by wind? – that is more relevant and important. Looking at what happened at 5:30am one morning is meaningless.

    November 14, 2009, 11:53 pm
  6. adrinavarro says

    > so we have to buy electricity from FranceNo, you’re really wrong. Just have a look at our realtime demand & generation graphs: http://www.ree.es/operacion/curvas_demanda.asp (right side)

    As I write this, it’s 2h05 (15-nov).

    We actually have some spare energy, and we only import energy when we expect spikes (mostly by night). Right now, we’re using exactly 1% of imported energy (..who said from france?). Also, at 22h45 (14nov) we were exporting about 4% of our energy. And we exported between ~4% and ~3% of our energy on the 22h to midnight term.

    Yesterday (14-nov) we used between 0.5% and 1% of imported energy between 21h and 22h. And between midnight and ~3h in the morning, we’re expecting to import between 2% (that actually was at midnight) and 0.5% (for the next 4 hours).

    By the way, there’s a clear policy about new nuclear plants: avoided if we can (because we still have some spare energy). We rely on combined cycle (17% as I’m writing this), wind (18%) and nuclear (26%). So, nuclear is still here. But don’t need more. And, what we import is pretty ridiculous (we export much more than we import).

    … Hey, we have nice-looking, nifty graphics, with real-time data! Please, use them! :)

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

    November 15, 2009, 2:08 am
  8. adrinavarro says

    9% is the lowest value, not the average!

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

    November 15, 2009, 2:10 am
  9. adrinavarro says

    9% is the lower value, not the average!

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

    November 15, 2009, 2:10 am
  15. barredo says

    > so we have to buy electricity from FranceLie. YearElectricity – imports (million kWh) 20009000 200111945 200212166 20037588 20047588 20059800 20068700 20078300 20088773 20098773 YearElectricity – exports (million kWh) 20005600 20016230 20027832 20034138 20044138 20054400 20067500 200711400 200814520 200914520Source: Cia Factbook.More: http://twitpic.com/5zscj/fullAnd more: http://twitpic.com/5zxm3/full2nd chart show how much % of Portuguese electricity is imported from Spain

    Source: Red Electrica Española (Spanish grid operator)

    France exports electricity to other countries such as Belgium and such (70k kWh last year)

    Last link shows consuption, production, imports and exports of electricty in Spain: http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?v=79&v=81&v=82…;

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

    November 15, 2009, 2:36 am
  16. barredo says

    > so we have to buy electricity from FranceLie. YearElectricity – imports (million kWh) 20009000 200111945 200212166 20037588 20047588 20059800 20068700 20078300 20088773 20098773 YearElectricity – exports (million kWh) 20005600 20016230 20027832 20034138 20044138 20054400 20067500 200711400 200814520 200914520

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

    November 15, 2009, 2:36 am
  17. barredo says

    > so we have to buy electricity from FranceLie. YearElectricity – imports (million kWh) 20009000 200111945 200212166 20037588 20047588 20059800 20068700 20078300 20088773 20098773 YearElectricity – exports (million kWh) 20005600 20016230 20027832 20034138 20044138 20054400 20067500 200711400 200814520 200914520Source: Cia Factbook.More: http://twitpic.com/5zscj/fullAnd more: http://twitpic.com/5zxm3/full2nd chart show how much % of Portuguese electricity is imported from Spain

    Source: Red Electrica Española (Spanish grid operator)

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

    November 15, 2009, 2:36 am
  27. samuel says

    Thank you for your eye-widening comment. It’s surprising how we swallow "well known facts" as this (everybody pretends to know that we import energy from french nuclears), without any research.The comment you answer wasn’t mine, but it could have been. Thanks.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

    November 15, 2009, 6:55 am
  28. cgherb911 says

    As a kite surfer I enjoyed your post.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

    November 15, 2009, 6:58 am
  32. sketerpot says

    Assuming perfect energy storage, the number you want is the average power production. You get this by multiplying the maximum output by the capacity factor, which is 21-23% in Spain.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

    November 15, 2009, 8:08 am
  33. uvdiv says

    Oh wow. I was just lurking here, and I see my own blog mentioned!I hate to be an exasperating pedant, but I am, and I must annoy you:

    "Spain only gets about 9% of energy from renewables on average,"

    It’s actually 9% of electricity from wind power, which is a very different statistic. As other commenters point out here, actually ~25% of Spanish electricity is renewable [1]; most of the difference is hydropower, which is also renewable. And then the proportion of energy is different yet, since most energy consumption is in forms that are not electric: i.e. natural gas heating, petrol fuel. See example energy flowcharts here [2].

    [1] (PDF file) http://www.ree.es/ingles/sistema_electrico/pdf/infosis/sinte…;

    [2] https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/energy/energy.html

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

    November 15, 2009, 8:40 am
  34. uvdiv says

    Oh no, it is the average value. You don’t want to know the lowest value. Or if you do, go to the Spanish utility’s site and browse statistics for the summer months, when wind is usually slower:http://www.ree.es/ingles/operacion/curvas_eolica.asp

    E.g. July 1st 2009 – minimum of 105 MWe, or about 0.3% of average demand. The recent peak was 11,500 MWe:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/spain-nati…;

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

    November 15, 2009, 8:48 am
  36. adrinavarro says

    You’re right. Anyway, and what I mean, is that the average of energy provided with enough wind is pretty high. The average isn’t that low for the 95th percentile (and the bottleneck is still the wind)

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

    November 15, 2009, 11:05 am
  37. narag says

    Interesting, I admit to have repeated what I’ve heard so many times without checking it.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

    November 15, 2009, 12:43 pm
  44. lallysingh says

    Hmm, I don’t know if I’m so jaded by bs news attention grabbing at this point or what, but I assumed that it hitting 53% was the news story, hence it being an event (and implicitly, a peak), not a steady-state average.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

    November 15, 2009, 3:13 pm
  45. TomRaftery says

    As the author of the article I can categorically refute this.The title of this article was never edited.

    And WordPress has obligingly saved all of the post revisions so I can quite easily prove this, if necessary.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

    November 15, 2009, 6:13 pm
  47. pg says

    He means the title on HN.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

    November 15, 2009, 6:40 pm
  49. shaddi says

    The linked article is a bit ambiguous, but remember that electricity is a subset of a country’s total energy needs.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

    November 15, 2009, 8:11 pm

1 2 3 4

Continuing the Discussion

  1. Weekend Reading Assignment « laurence turner linked to this post on November 14, 2009

    [...] wind in the sails of the Green Movement? Perhaps… Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind!, greenmonk.net / Sarah Palin Suggests Coin Conspiracy In Wisconsin Speech, huffingtonpost.com / [...]

  2. Christians dagbok – 2009-11-14 | En sur karamell linked to this post on November 14, 2009

    [...] Shared Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind*. [...]

  3. Smart Grid Blog » Blog Archive » Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind! — GreenMonk: the blog linked to this post on November 16, 2009

    [...] via Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind! — GreenMonk: the blog. [...]



Some HTML is OK

or, reply to this post via trackback.

Additional comments powered by BackType

« »

GreenMonk: the blog is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache