Spain has gone from being the renewable envy of Europe to becoming a case study in the dangers of saturation. This summer, the country reached a historic milestone where the combined generation of sun and wind exceeded 10,500 GWh per month.
This disconnection has caused an unexpected effect: there is so much electricity that its value has plummeted. For companies that invested millions in solar panels, the business has ceased to be profitable, transforming what was a success story into a “saturation crisis” that puts the Spanish market in check.
The “discount” market and its collapse. The current outlook for solar park owners is bleak. “It’s discount season,” says Carmen Izquierdo, co-founder of nTeaser, speaking to the Financial Times. The saturation is such that operational solar plants have seen their valuation fall from €916,000/MW at the beginning of 2024 to just €648,000/MW today.
The situation is more dramatic in “ready to build” projects (with land and permits but without work). As detailed by the Financial Timesthe market is so flooded that some developers, desperate to avoid government sanctions for not being able to execute agreed construction plans, have gone so far as to offer projects for the symbolic value of 1 euro. This situation has led to a wave of fire sales or liquidation sales, where companies sacrifice part of their portfolios to try to save the rest of their capital.
Anatomy of a bottleneck. Why does the bill continue to rise if there is too much energy? The answer lies in outdated infrastructure. According to an analysis by EmberSpain only invests 30 cents in electrical networks for every euro allocated to renewables, a figure that is less than half of the European average.
Added to this lack of investment is the impact of the “Great Blackout” of April 28. After that incident, Red Eléctrica began to operate in “reinforced mode”activating (more expensive) gas plants constantly to stabilize the network tension. This emergency strategy has cost consumers an additional billion euros. Furthermore, given the inability of the grid to absorb all the energy generated at noon, the curtailment (clean energy that is wasted) has tripled, going from 1.8% to 7.2% in just a few months.
The race for flexibility. The industry is no longer looking to install more panels, but rather to survive the ones it already has. According to the Financial Timesthe great hope is the batteries. Installing storage allows producers to “save” unprofitable projects by storing energy when the price is zero—or negative—during the day and selling it at night.
Other solutions in progress:
- PPA Contracts: Companies like Zelestra sign long-term agreements with giants like Microsoft or Amazon to power data centers, although the prices requested by buyers are falling dangerously below the profitability threshold of €30/MWh.
- Export: Spain seeks to break its “energy isolation” with projects such as the submarine cable with Irelandscheduled for 2030, which will allow the solar surplus to be sent to northern Europe.
- Regulatory reforms: After the rejection of Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 in Congress, the Government is looking for alternative ways to encourage microgrids and grid forming (technology so that batteries stabilize the network as if they were traditional power plants).
A structural “January Cost”. Despite technological advances, the citizen’s pocketbook faces a contradictory scenario. According to the latest resolution of the CNMCthe total remuneration that companies will receive for maintaining the transport and distribution networks will rise by 4.1%, reaching 6,608 million euros.
However, the final impact is a puzzle of forecasts. The CNMC estimates that for homes (2.0 TD rate) tolls could drop by 1.3%, as long as their forecast that energy demand rises by 3.6% is met. but here conflict appears: while the Ministry for the Ecological Transition is very optimistic and proposes an increase in charges of 10.5% based on a consumption growth of 4.5%, the regulator (the CNMC) is more cautious.
This imbalance of figures is dangerous. If demand does not grow as much as the Government expects, the system will not collect what is expected to cover the costs of renewables and networks. This would once again open the door to the feared tariff deficit, a historic debt that took Spain more than a decade to absorb.
Furthermore, for those who sought refuge in self-consumption, the lesson of the April blackout was bitter: only the 33% of domestic installations In Spain they have batteries. Without that extra outlay, the solar panels automatically disconnect during a general outage due to safety regulations, leaving the user in the dark despite having the sun on their side.
Europe’s energy laboratory. Spain has become the world showcase of the energy transition. It has shown that coal can be expelled from the system — taking place since July without generating it for the first time in 140 years—, but it has also shown that abundance without management is inefficient.
How Ember’s analysis concludesthe challenge for 2026 is not to install more panels, but to modernize the network and focus on flexibility. As an executive cited by the Financial Times summarizes:the mistake was not putting up panels, but forgetting about the networks. The bill we pay at the end of the month is not going to improve by breaking production records, but by being able to take advantage of every ray of sunshine. Today, the future of our energy does not depend on it getting warmer, but on cables and batteries finally arriving on time.
Image | Unsplash
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