From Madrid, we motored for more than four hours to this quaint city located in the region of Navarra. Pamplona is the historical capital city of Navarra. The city is famous worldwide for the San Fermín bull running festival held every year from July 6 to 14.
This festival brings foreign and local tourists to join the dangerous – and some instances fatal – taunting and then running away from enraged bulls let loose on the cobbled streets of Plaza del Castillo.
Despite the good start of the tourism season here in terms of tourist arrivals, the forecast of analysts in the European Union (EU) remains gloomy as Spain’s unemployment rate will remain around 24.6 percent at the end of this year.
While it is more popular for its annual bull running festival, Pamplona is also known as a city powered on renewable energy. The region obtains more than 70 percent of its electricity from wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources since Spain adopted clean energy policy in the mid-1990s.
The first stop of our visit is Pamplona’s neighboring city of Sarriguren where we were received by top executives of the Centro Nacionale de Energias Renovables (CENER). It is actually a semi-government, semi-private international no-profit foundation engaged in research and development (R & D) on new technologies for renewable energy.
Fernando Sanchez, scientific director of CENER told us they have about 200 clients all over the world with R & D contracts with them on renewable energy. The Philippines is not one of them as of yet. Despite their domestic economic woes, Sanchez cited CENER keeps Spain in its continuous pursuit to revolutionize technologies that will further enhance their country’s self-sufficiency on renewable energy.
But from what we gathered in the media briefings given to us in the first days of our visit here, concerns were raised that Spain’s success in renewable energy won’t be sustained. Worse, Spain’s leadership in renewable energy is facing another slide by the government’s planned austerity measures to stem off the continuing contraction of the economy.
The Union Espanola Fotovoltaica (UNEF) and the Asociacion Empresarial Eolica (AEE) – organizations of the solar energy and wind power operators here, respectively – have been up in arms against the Spanish Parliament plans to reduce feed-in-tariff (FIT), or the subsidy scheme for renewable energy projects.
After having pioneered and was the biggest user of solar power as a major source of electricity in the past, Spain has been dislodged in recent times by China, Germany, Japan and Italy. Tomas Diaz, communications director of UNEF, conceded much of the reason for this was largely due to the new technologies being developed in the world market for renewable energy.
“Advances in technology, that is the game. We have now more and new players in the market and technology is easy to deploy,” Diaz pointed out. Unfortunately, Diaz rued, Spain has not been “technologically-driven” and this has reduced their country’s competitive edge in solar energy sector.
While he confirmed with obvious reluctance that indeed China has taken the lead in this field, Sanchez explained that it is more on technical issues why Chinese photovoltaic (solar power) system is more competitive than Spain’s. “It is true that China has become a leader also in wind power,” Sanchez admitted. By the way, Sanchez also sits as a member of the International Board of Chinese National Renewable Center.
According to the International Energy Agency, Spain is currently the world’s fourth-largest user of wind power.
We learned there are about 1,500 windmills in Navarra alone, some of which we saw dotting the hilltops that we passed along in our scenic drive going here.
Sanchez said as much as one gigawatt (GW) – equivalent to 1,000 megawatts (MW) – of electricity is being produced by wind power in Navarra. All over Spain, he disclosed, there are now over 12,000 windmills that produce around 22-GW of electricity in their country.
Gamesa, one of the two major wind power operators here, put up recently an experimental windmill of gigantic size up in the high hills of Sierra de Alaiz. From CENER headquarters, we were taken to a long drive to the Sierra where we toured the windmill farms spread along these hilltops.
It was equipped with Gamesa’s latest prototype wind turbines and operated on a complex put up at the Sierra hills, a rugged terrain where strong winds could gravely endanger one’s footing. We braved the dangerous trail on a van, put on hard hats and life vests.
Up close and personal, we were able to see the inside hull of the prototype windmill tower. It stood 120 meters from the ground and has three blades each measuring 80 meters long. Inside the prototype whose floor areas is about 2.5 meters in diameter is an elevator that can fit two persons to take them all the way up to the power box of the windmill. With that size, we were told the prototype could alone produce as much as 4.5 MW of electricity.
Prefabricated concrete slabs as thick as two feet were put together one after the other from the base up to the middle portion of the windmill. The rest of the uppermost portion of the tower was made of steel plates. The wind farm also has four 120-meter weather masts monitoring wind speed and direction, temperatures and humidity.
Definitely, the windmills in Bangui, Ilocos Norte would look like mini versions of this prototype. However, Javier San Miguel, CENER communications director, noted with interest the Philippines is now among the fastest growing player in renewable energy in Asia after China, India, Japan and South Korea.
The CENER executive confessed Spain has been closely following the progress of the development of renewable energy in the Philippines and is bullish to be part of it. Like the bulls of Pamplona, if I may add.
