Five flexibility pilot projects get go ahead in Spain
Image: MITECO
Spain’s Ministry for the Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge (MITECO) has approved five pilots to accelerate flexibility innovation for the country’s electricity system.
The projects are implemented under a first-of-its-kind regulatory sandbox in Spain, which is enabling certain exemptions from sectoral regulations and contributing to regulatory innovation. They are expected to mark a major step forward in making the electricity system more flexible to adapt to the sector’s changing needs.
The five projects, which have provisionally received €10 million ($11.3 million) in support, are located throughout Spain and specifically will take place in numerous locations in Andalusia, Aragon, Asturias, Cantabria, Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León, Catalonia, the Valencian Community, Galicia, Madrid, Navarre and the Basque Country.
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The five projects, with a maximum duration of two years, are as follows.
The ‘Distribution grid flexibility solutions’ (S2F) project is under a group of 10 distributors, OMIE, Comillas University, CIDE, ASEME and AELEC and proposes to investigate use cases with local flexibility markets and flexible access capacity.
The ‘Citizen storage’ project from EDP Clientes aims to demonstrate that the operation of a behind-the-meter battery that manages the customer’s demand is compatible with the distribution of surpluses to the grid as a first step towards managing these surpluses in an aggregated manner.
The ‘I-flex’ project from IGNIS Energía proposes to create appropriate incentives to enable demand, storage and renewable generation flexibility and to eliminate regulatory barriers to participation in balancing markets.
The ‘Flexability’ project from a consortium of Francisco Espinosa and associates, Energy Management Services, Galp Energia España, Ferrovial Construcción, Indra, OMIE, ETECNIC Movilidad Eléctrica, Norvento, and Green Eagle Solutions, aims to conduct tests to help define the business model for independent aggregators in the energy markets and in the new local flexibility markets.
The ’Energía del Prat: shared distributed storage’ project from Comunità Energía del Prat, Olivoenergy Consulting, Bamboo Energy Platform, IREC and OMIE involves the deployment of distributed shared storage energy resources at the local level through batteries and management by an energy community.
The funding, announced in March 2025, is from Spain’s recovery, transformation and resilience plan, which is funded by the EU through its NextGenerationEU initiative.
