Jorge Muñoz Riesco. Image courtesy Iberdrola
Spain’s EV uptake has been seeing significant momentum, with 2025 perhaps marking a ‘swing’ for the sector. And for Jorge Muñoz Riesco, Head of Smart Mobility at Iberdrola, it was “the year that we were waiting for”.
So said Riesco during episode two of a special edition Energy Transitions podcast, focusing on Spain’s journey to greener transport:
“This year, during 2025, we are seeing a big increase in EV penetration: it’s really the year that we were waiting for.”
But as this uptake increases, so too does energy supply and with it power grid constraints rear their head. All of this raises the question: is Spain grid-ready for en masse EV uptake?
For Riesco, while grid challenges are something to be wary of, they will be more of a focus in the coming years.
Challenge: How to invest?
Said Riesco: “The power network in Spain is a very good network. It has had lots of investments in the last years.
“Up to this point, we are more or less okay. The real challenges are going to come in the next years because the investment in the network should come before the deployment of charging stations.”
According to Riesco, charging stations built to date include those with capacities of 1-3MW for high-power charging. However, with the increasing uptake of electric trucks and other heavy-duty transport, issues begin to arise.
“Stations are required to sometimes be in very rural areas or not close to the big nodes of the network.
“What we need to keep developing a well-distributed network to serve all the needs of those kinds of transports would be to have the electric network reach to those places with high power.”
It is here that the challenges lie over the next decade, says Riesco.
Specifically, he says, power networks must be invested in and developed in advance of deploying charging infrastructure: cables, substations, and high-voltage access points all need to be in place.
Such proactive and anticipatory investment, says Riesco, is crucial, especially as urban areas also begin to see steeper energy demands from increasing numbers of EVs.
More from on mobility in Spain:
Podcast: Can Spain’s transport sector keep pace with decarbonisation?
Is Spain’s EV sector finally getting the momentum it needs?
Challenge: Managing energy
Investment in the physical network isn’t the only consideration. For Riesco, a second core challenge to be aware of is energy and its management.
For Riesco, this boils down to “how we are going to be able to manage the flows”.
When it comes to EV uptake, a burgeoning method of managing its power has been bidirectional charging and technologies such as vehicle-to-grid (V2G), vehicle-to-home (V2G) and vehicle-to-everything (V2X), which allow for power to be injected from the EV and its battery into the power system.
The technology holds significant promise for grid balancing, but technology readiness and regulation are not quite where they need to be for their widespread use in Europe, let alone Spain specifically.
How that bidirectionality is managed in the future, he says, is “going to be a big deal”.
“But we also need a regulation to be able to inject massively into the network, energy from batteries at certain hours.
“It’s not something that is now crucial for the EV and for the economics of the EV, as we only have 2% of penetration in the total stock of cars.
“When we’re speaking of 20%, 30%, 50% there will be a huge amount of batteries distributed along the country. A lot of people will probably want to consume at the same time, and it will be a smart way of distributing that load and be able to balance the system.”
That said, says Riesco, V2G will come.
“It will be needed and it will help the network to stabilise and to be able to manage the loads in the future.
“The shape of consumption is changing.”
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Originally published on Enlit World.
