New record in wind power in Spain

With such a graceful name, the storm ‘Bella’ has provided wind power to end 2020 with a new record for instantaneous generation on December 28 at 2:28 pm, according to data from Red Eléctrica. 19,588 MW of wind energy were put into operation at the same time, producing a record instantaneous power for wind technology, which represented an increase of 3.76% compared to the previous maximum of 18,879 MW, registered on December 12, 2019.

Also at that time, 83% of the demand registered in the peninsular electricity system was covered with renewable energy, with wind power being the leading technology. But it is not the only wind power record in 2020, because during the month of December wind power generated 7,455 GWh in the peninsular electricity system. Wind production has represented a share of 31.4% of the monthly accumulated, as extracted from the daily balance report published by REE, which leads the price of the Spanish electricity market to be the lowest of the main European markets:

Source: REE and AEE elaboration

Renewable technologies generated a total of 10,042 GWh in December, which represents more than half of the generation mix (51%). The renewable production of 2020, which represents 45.3% of the total in the peninsular electricity system, has increased by 12.6% from January 1 to December 27 compared to the same period of the previous year. In this period, more than a fifth of the electricity generated had its origin in the wind.

2020 renewable figures

Wind technology was the renewable with the greatest presence in 2020, reaching 21.7% of total electricity. Nuclear energy is ahead with 22.2% of the total, while in the following positions are the combined cycle plants (17.8% of the total), hydraulic energy (11.9%), cogeneration (10.8%) and solar photovoltaic (6.1%).

Renewable technologies produced 43.6% of all electricity in Spain in 2020 and thus register their largest share in the generation mix since there are records (2007), according to provisional data from REE.
The share of renewable energies in the overall electricity generation in Spain is 6.1 percentage points higher in 2020 than in 2019. Until now, the year with the greatest weight of renewables in the Spanish electricity sector was 2014.