Amics de la Terra considers the judgement an advance for energy self-generation.
The Constitutional Court has voided the Real Decreto de Autoconsumo (Energy Self-Generation Royal Decree) article in which shared energy generation was prohibited. Amics de la Terra is pleased about the judgement, which we see as a first step towards resuming community energy generation in Spain.
The article made it illegal to do a thing as basic as a group of neighbours installing a few solar panels and sharing the electricity generated, as well as paying for any costs to the community by using electricity and selling it to the network.
The shared energy generation ban may have its days numbered with the Constitutional Court’s judgement, which recently assessed this article to be null and unconstitutional, although only partially, accepting the Generalitat de Catalunya legal team’s appeal due to positive conflict.
Clean energy producers and consumers, and much of civil society, celebrated this decision and are hopeful that the sector’s worst moments are now behind it once and for all.
Hector de Prado from Amics de la Terra, which is part of the Aliança pe l’Autoconsum (Energy Self-Generation Alliance), noted:
“A significant step forward has been taken so that shared energy generation becomes a reality. It was unacceptable that a group of environmentally conscious people would have to pay for energy that they themselves had produced and were using.”
The expert highlighted that the study ‘The potential of energy citizens in the EU‘, carried out by consultant CE Delft in 2016, confirmed that in Spain only, half of all Spaniards could produce their own energy by 2050.
“The associated benefits are enormous, not just in terms of the environment, but also economically, because it would mean a saving as huge quantities of foreign fossil fuels would not need to be imported, as well as achieving complete energy democracy.”
