Lisbon, Oct. 2, 2024 (Lusa) - Endesa's CEO in Portugal, Guillermo Soler, has in an interview with Lusa said that the Spanish energy company has decided to abandon the use of natural gas to generate electricity by 2040, as part of decarbonisation efforts.
"In 2040, we are going to abandon gas as a clear and strategic decarbonisation measure and focus on electrification," announced Endesa's CEO in Portugal, who took over the leadership of the company in February 2023, succeeding Nuno Ribeiro da Silva.
Portugal has four natural gas combined cycle power stations - Ribatejo, Lares, Pego and Tapada do Outeiro - which give the national electricity system the capacity to react when renewable energy sources are lacking.
Endesa noted that no electricity company had yet announced such a decision, because it is an audacious one from which there is no return, as has already happened with coal.
"In generation, in Portugal, the main premise is decarbonisation: we closed the Pego plant, which was coal-fired, and Las Puentes, in Spain, which were the last two coal-fired plants on the Iberian Peninsula, and we have a goal of quitting gas by 2040, in other words, from a strategic point of view in generation, decarbonisation is the main thing," he said.
The Pego thermoelectric plant, in the municipality of Abrantes, in Portugal's Santarém district, in which Endesa was a shareholder, stopped generating energy from coal in November 2021, following a government decision as part of the national decarbonisation strategy that, according to trade union representatives, affected 150 workers and 350 family members in a town of 2,500 inhabitants.
Endesa won the just transition tender for the conversion of the Pego plant, with an investment project worth around €700 million that combines the hybridisation of renewable sources (solar photovoltaic and wind) and the storage of electricity generated from them, with social and economic development initiatives.
Given the complexity of the project, the company decided to divide it into four blocks, which are at different stages of environmental processing, with a view to its becoming operational in 2027. The first block in Aranhas, for wind energy equivalent to the consumption of 350,000 homes for a year, is awaiting the results of the public consultation.
"I believe that the work to prepare this environmental permit has been done with great consideration and sensitivity," said Guillermo Soler. "We are confident that we won't have any major problems, but we have to wait for the outcome of the public consultation."
The project for Pego foresees the introduction of electricity from different technologies at a single connection point to the grid, with commercial operation scheduled for 2027 so that the necessary tests can be carried out to ensure that this hybridisation works correctly.
"On a sunny day, it will be possible to inject [solar] energy into the connection point, but if we also have wind on that day, the limitation of the connection point will mean that energy will have to be stored in batteries," explained the director-general, emphasising that this process "has a complexity that is not just about developing the wind farm, or the photovoltaic, or the battery, or the electrolyser."
In addition to the "star project" in Pego, Endesa has two other smaller projects in Portugal that should be ready for operation at around the same time as Pego, after having won the floating solar auction at the Alto da Rabagão reservoir in Montalegre, and also the Pereiro photovoltaic park in the Algarve, obtained from the 2020 auction.
"In total, in these three projects, we're talking about an investment of 925 million euros for Portugal and we're talking about 1 gigawatt (GW) of installed power in the country, which is already very significant," emphasised Guillermo Soler.
MPE/ARO // ARO.
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