Abstract
This paper lays out the role of the first centre in the world for the integration into the electrical grid of electricity coming from renewable energy (the Spanish acronym for which is CECRE (Centro de Control de Energías Renovables; Control Centre for Renewable Energies)) and the industrial development of large energy suppliers and wind turbine manufacturers in Spain. These two initiatives enabled the development of one of the first integrated markets for this type of energy source. The key contributions were the development of two software programs (wind management and management of solar light incidence), their visual implementation, and centralized digital control. An economic and business history approach is used to show the rise and relative failure of the Spanish wind industry during the period 2004–2015, when Spain became the fourth country after China, the US, and Germany in terms of installed capacity of renewable energy and, in relative terms, the second country after Denmark. This study is unique in that it provides an integrated vision of the reasons for the relative fall of Spain in the world ranking of wind energy producers. The methodology of the economic analysis of industrial policies makes it possible to explain the fall in the relative importance of Spain in the international panorama of wind farms.
Highlights
The significance of this article lies in the fact that it offers a detailed explanation of Spain’s rise to the top of the world’s installed wind power capacity during the first decade of the 21st century and its subsequent decline over the second decade.Spain became a global power in the production of wind energy, in both absolute and relative terms, from the end of the 1990s to the Great Recession (Figures 1 and 2, and Table 1)
The government needed to reduce the “tariff deficit” and to make large producers stop relying on premiums to set their wind farms in motion and, convince them to turn on large, efficient thermal plants, to take advantage of the low prices of oil and natural gas
In the case of the development of wind energy, Spain was driven by the need to overcome several obstacles, e.g., a relatively poor orographic endowment for installing wind farms, a not favourable social perception of renewable energies, and its real status as an “energy island” because it has very few connections to the European electricity grid
Summary
The significance of this article lies in the fact that it offers a detailed explanation of Spain’s rise to the top of the world’s installed wind power capacity during the first decade of the 21st century and its subsequent decline over the second decade. Our hypothesis is that two windows of opportunity for catching up in matters of renewable energies were opened thanks to two different types of technological knowledge which had accumulated in Spanish industry These windows of opportunity were those which allowed the country to make a virtue of necessity and overcome two obstacles, namely a low social demand for the utilisation of renewable energies for private use and a relatively low primary (potential) wind energy. It was the two different types of specific technological knowledge which we will mention that made it so attractive to invest in. The first of the countries acquiring the knowledge required for an efficient management of thousands of wind farms would take the place of one of the traditional leaders in the field
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