A year of storage, despite the warranty regime? | Legal
The draft National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan (PNIEC) sets a target of installing 22 GW of storage systems by 2030, in line with the Spanish Energy Storage Strategy approved in February 2021, which highlights the key role of storage as a technology that enables flexibility of the energy system and is necessary for safe operation.
PNIEC therefore concludes that future energy supplies will come primarily from “renewable sources, in many cases intermittent and uncontrollable”, with storage being a key element of energy system flexibility. Likewise, Red Eléctrica de España (REE), in its report on the 2023 national analysis of the peninsula’s grid coverage, highlights the need for electricity storage to cover the intermittencies inherent in renewable energy generation technologies.
Although energy policies encourage energy storage systems, the sector faces a major obstacle in the process of connecting to the grid due to Royal Decree-Law 8/2023 of December 27th. This standard addresses the surge in network access requests to connect new consumption (including storage) and recognizes the lack of a clearly defined expiration date for access permissions for demand, which can lead to speculative hoarding of resources.
To avoid this, Royal Decree-Law 8/2023 introduces a demand-side financial guarantee regime, amending Royal Decree 1183/2020 of 29 December. Therefore, before requesting access and connection to electricity consuming facilities such as storage facilities, the applicant must provide an economic guarantee of 20 euro/kW is required. The problem is that, in addition, storage systems that can supply energy to the grid must provide an additional guarantee to obtain permission to access and connect on the generation side, equivalent to 40 euros/kW of installed capacity, in accordance with Real Decree 1183/2020 . .
Royal Decree-Law 8/2023 also stipulates that storage facilities that already have access and connection permits from the demand side before it comes into force must make guarantees within six months and submit a receipt to the network manager. the next six, access is automatically terminated if the receipt is not submitted on time.
In this context, as of January 10, the Royal Decree Law 8/2023 is being considered as a bill in Congress. In March, amendments were published to help eliminate ambiguity in the regime for guaranteeing storage facilities. Although this change is expected by the sector and is in line with the policy of promoting storage systems, after more than four months of negotiations, the current regime is still a regime of double guarantees.
The change in the warranty regime does not have a clear date for two reasons. First, recent actions by Parliament make it difficult to predict the outcome of the amendments, so there is no guarantee that the statutory text incorporating this change will be agreed upon, although all elements appear to point in that direction. Secondly, consideration of a bill can be delayed even if, as in this case, it is classified as urgent, making it difficult to predict when the final text will be published and come into force.
Therefore, until then, despite the fact that a year of storage awaits us and there is no doubt in the sector about its key role, its development in Spain starts with serious obstaclespositioning itself as a new challenge in the fight against climate change and the energy transition.
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