Abstract

Spain has become one of the leading countries in the world in promoting electricity generation from renewable energy sources (RES), due to their positive socioeconomic and environmental impacts, through highly favorable regulatory frameworks and public incentives set by Spanish governments mainly during the first decade of 2000s, i.e., Royal Decree (RD) 2818/1998, RD 436/2004 and RD 661/2007. Conversely, the highly favorable regime applicable to RES, and specifically to solar power plants during the 1998–2008 promotion period turned into an extremely unfavorable scenario during the 2008–2020 cost-containment stage, characterized by the dismantling of the previous promotion schemes so as to reduce the skyrocketing electricity system tariff deficit, in which regulations such as RD 1578/2008, Royal Decree Law (RDL) 6/2009, RDL 14/2010, RDL 1/2012, Law 15/2012, RDL 9/2013, Law 24/2013 and RD 413/2014 stood out. Nonetheless, the Spanish renewable sector, and especially the solar power sector, has shown great dynamism in its energy policy in the period 1998–2020. This academic contribution provides a comprehensive review of the energy policy evolution for the whole solar power sector in Spain, specifically both solar photovoltaic (PV) and concentrating solar power (CSP) plants, over the last 23 years. Thus, considering both the boom in the solar power sector as well as the solar sector’s bust, a survey of the different legislation in force during the 1998–2020 period, as well as of the existing academic literature dealing with this issue, is conducted to first contextualize and describe, and then carefully assess, the last 23 years of solar energy policy in Spain. In brief, the decisive role of the Spanish government in developing the RES sector, and especially the solar power sector, in recent years has been noted. In this vein, a good planning of the energy development model, the regulatory stability, the simplicity and agility of the corresponding administrative process, the appropriate design of support mechanisms, as well as security and predictability of support levels in the mid and long term, play an important role in providing certainty to all the stakeholders. During the 1998–2008 promotion stage, even with a stable, quite favorable and easily predictable RES support mechanism in place, the Spanish solar system behaved as an open-loop system without any control structure detecting and reacting to problematic situations. The fact that the Spanish government was compelled to implement ex-post measures during the period 2008–2020, seriously jeopardizing the viability of the power plants in operation, as well as compromising the legal–economic stability of the renewable energy sector, clearly indicated a malfunctioning of the energy policy control mechanism. In essence, it is hoped that the lessons extracted from this 23-year comprehensive review of the Spanish solar power sector pathway could be quite useful for other countries either in the initial development stage or fully immersed in the promotion of solar power sector or any other renewable technology.

Highlights

  • New classification for the special regime (SR) solar facilities set by Royal Decree (RD) 2818/1998 Amendment of RD 2818/1998 and suppression of the modifications introduced by RD 1955/2000 concerning the concentrating solar power (CSP) plants – b.1.1 for solar PV facilities and b.1.2 for CSP plants See Table 2 for a detailed summary of the changes introduced by RD 841/2002 in RD 2818/1998 economic scheme for the solar power plants – Unlike both RD 2818/1998 and RD 1955/2000, RD 841/2002 stated that fuel could be used to keep the temperature of the heat storage system of CSP facilities in subgroup b.1.2 during interruption periods of power production

  • ­ The specific remuneration would be granted by a competitive procedure ­ The conditions, technologies or group of specific facilities that could participate in the competitive competition mechanism would be established by RD ­ The average yield of the 10-year Spanish bonds for the first regulatory period of the new power plants would be computed over the three months prior to the enactment of Royal Decree Law (RDL) 9/2013 and a differential of 300 basis points (BP) would be added ­ The remuneration parameters would be reviewed at the beginning of the 6-year regulatory periods, except the regulatory useful life and the standard value of the initial investment

  • This work provides a comprehensive review of the energy policy evolution for the whole solar power sector in Spain, namely both solar PV and CSP technologies, from 1998 to 2020

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Summary

Setting the Context

Remains, a fundamental sector to bear in mind in any energy policy across the world aimed at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the fight against global warming [1,2,3,4]. Set feed-in pricing policies, FIT and FIP, have remained as the most widely adopted form of renewable power support worldwide until 2017, when competitive auctions became the main RES promotion mechanism [4]. Notwithstanding the effectiveness of the incentive-based feed-in instrument, it has had a major drawback concerning its associated cost-burden, generally transferred to electricity consumers through their bills, in countries with significant raises in RES deployment and especially for high-cost renewable technologies. The cutback of RES promotion costs by reversing the previously set supports and dismantling the renewable energy policies has become a policy priority and a major concern in many countries all over the world, such as Spain, France, Italy and Czech Republic [3,10,11,16,17,27,28,34,44,45]. Spain has seen notable decarbonization of the electricity sector, as the share of electricity production from fossil fuels diminished from 56% in 2009 to 41% in 2019, while electricity production from RES increased from 24% in 2009 to 38% in 2019, ranking thirteenth highest in terms of the share of RES that year among the IEA countries [21]

State of the Art
Justification and Main Contributions of the Review
The 1998–2004 Subperiod
The 2004–2008 Subperiod
The 2008–2013 Subperiod
The 2013–2020 Subperiod: A New Paradigm for the Spanish Solar Power Sector
Concerning the Solar PV Technology Sector
Concerning the CSP Technology Sector
Conclusions
Findings
63. Energy for the Future
Full Text
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