According to VisualCapitalist, Spain is currently placed 5th globally in the development of solar power, up there with the big super powers, and ahead of many! With 131 GW of prospective solar capacity, it is way ahead of the UK, Germany, Mexico and Japan. China tops the table with an amazing 35% of all global prospective solar capacity, followed by the US, India and Brazil, then comes Spain, ahead of Australia (6th) and Greece (7th). Neither Italy nor France make the top 20. Read the article and see the table here.
This follows a story in the Guardian, a few days before, of the small Catalan town of Taradell, where four activists came together with the aim of supplying the town’s people with renewable energy. The activists formed a cooperative, Taradell Sostenible, which now has 111 members and supplies power to more than 100 households, including some of the area’s most vulnerable. According to Eugeni Vila, the cooperative’s president. “The question was how could people with few resources join the coop when membership costs €100…We agreed that people designated as poor by the local authority could join for only €25 and thus benefit from the cheap electricity we generate.”
Renewable energy has been hugely important for Spain which, according to the Guardian, “has no gas or oil and little coal of its own, but (as we know) an abundance of sunshine”. From 2015 solar installation here was held back by a “sunshine tax” aimed at protecting the big power companies who claimed that energy self-sufficiency amounted to unfair competition. The tax was abolished in 2018, and energy self-sufficiency, mainly in the form of solar panels, has increased 17-fold since, according to the government’s Institute for the Diversification and Saving of Energy. The institute is providing energy communities such as Taradell, with initial funding of €148.5m, earmarked for 200 projects.
Read the Guardian article here.