Spain's energy-intensive users delay again renewables auction - report

June 2 (Renewables Now) - Spain’s energy-intensive industry will again postpone its private renewables auction, which it was hoping to stage more than a year ago in an effort to shield itself from high power market prices, Spanish news outlet El Periodico de Espana (EPE) reported on Thursday.

Aege, the 28-member strong association representing the largest industrial energy consumers in Spain, told EPE that the auction design was almost finalised, but the exact mechanism still needed to be agreed with the Spanish government, the antitrust regulator CNMC and the securities market commission CNMV.

Once the final pieces are in place, Aege will begin informing parties interested in selling renewable energy and will activate a pre-qualification process for participants. For now, the auction is delayed until after the summer and probably well into the fourth quarter of the year, EPE reported.

The delay has nothing to do with July 23 snap general election that Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez called on Monday, the report says. Aege’s director general, Pedro Gonzalez, told EPE that the remaining details are “strictly administrative, not political.”

The private auction, for what was first reported to be a mass procurement of around 2,000 MW of wind and solar power, has been postponed several times in 2022. First, due to obligations of the Iberian wholesale electricity market operator OMIE, which was tasked with managing the auction in the style of government tenders for renewable energy. Later in the summer of 2022, the auction was pushed again so as not to compete with government's two tenders that autumn.

The goal of the exercise was to enable energy-intensive companies to contract cheap wind and solar under ten to 12-year power purchase agreements (PPAs) to reduce the impact of market volatility.

So far in 2023, Spain’s energy-intensive industry purchased 90% of its electricity on OMIE’s market, according to Aege’s barometer.