Image courtesy Iberdrola
The European Investment Bank (EIB) has signed two €25 million ($28.9 million) loans with Iberdrola to finance the reconstruction, redesign, climate change adaptation and digitalisation work they are carrying out on the power distribution grid damaged by the floods that hit Valencia in October 2024.
The €50 million ($57.8 million) investment will support Iberdrola’s il.lumina project, covering measures to rebuild damaged infrastructure, expand facility automation, instal smart transformers to improve supply quality, move overhead power lines underground, and raise and downsize transformer substations.
These operations are expected to benefit more than 650 000 clients, according to the electric company, improving electricity supply security against a backdrop of extreme weather events and increasing integration of renewable energy production.
The financing includes €25 million from the EIB’s own resources and a further €25 million from the Regional Resilience Fund created to facilitate access to NextGenerationEU loans under Spain’s recovery, transformation and resilience plan.
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il-lumina and the October floods
The floods on 29 October in the province of Valencia resulted in approximately 180,000 customers losing electricity in l’Horta Sud, Catadau-Carlet and Requena-Utiel-Buñol.
Iberdrola presented the il.lumina project in January 2025 with a €100 million ($115.6 million) investment to redesign and future-proof the distribution in the wake of the flooding.
At the time, said CEO of Iberdrola España, Mario Ruiz-Tagle: “Although the company, despite enormous difficulties, was able to get practically all electricity back online in under 72 hours, our priority now is to look to the future and to have an even more efficient distribution grid”.
The company created a team of 35 people dedicated exclusively to the il.lumina project, which is divided into five operational areas under the same management and has seven support areas to coordinate the work of the approximately 1,000 contractors who will be needed, most of whom will be locally based.
Iberdrola began the different phases of the project at the end of 2024 with the recovery of the 132kV high voltage infrastructure in the Catadau and Carlet area.
The il·lumina project involves the renovation of substations, transformer stations and the medium and low voltage network, with the aim of redesigning the electricity network affected by the floods.
Its plan is to reach 90% of the project’s execution in 2025 and to complete it in 2026.
In 2024, the EIB Group directed €8.5 billion ($9.8 billion) to financing power grid and storage projects in all of its operational areas, double the 2023 figure.
In Spain alone, €1.5 billion ($1.7 billion) went to grid and storage projects in 2024, also doubling 2023 investment. This financing helps expand, modernise and digitalise power grids, making them more resilient and enabling more integration of renewable energy.
