Pioneers of the wind

On 18 December 1994 six wind turbines that offered a profile never seen before on the El Perdón mountain range near Pamplona started to produce electricity. Those giants – the biggest in the world at the time, 40 metres high and with a capacity of 500 kW – seem small nowadays in comparison with their modern-day brothers, which are three times taller and ten times more powerful.

However, they were the first, pioneers at a time when just a few visionaries ahead of their time realised that the energy future of the human race lay with the wind, the sun and other renewable energy sources.

When ACCIONA Energía – at the time, Energía Hidroeléctrica de Navarra (EHN), which later became a part of ACCIONA – implemented the first phase of the El Perdón windfarm it was making history. That pioneering installation was implanted on a mountain range clearly visible from the city of Pamplona and the surrounding area, at a spot often visited by local residents (around 250,000 people in the area). The idea was to show citizens what this new energy that was destined to regenerate the planet looked like, at a time when hardly anybody had heard of the term ‘climate change’.

That bet on the future paid off. Thousands of people visited the site of the future wind farm in the following weeks An independent opinion survey carried out in March 1995 by the consultancy company CIES revealed that 85% of the people in Pamplona and the surrounding area had a positive opinion on the windfarm, with only 1% against it. Considerable efforts had previously been made to explain the benefits of wind power to political/social stakeholders and the media, and this played a major role society’s acceptance of an installation built on one of the most popular leisure areas near the capital city of Navarra.

At the same time as it was installing the first wind turbines in Navarra, ACCIONA was undertaking another pioneering milestone in the Spanish wind power sector: the KW Tarifa wind farm in the province of Cádiz (southern Spain), which opened in July 1995 and consisted of no less than ninety 330 kW wind turbines.

So, the company pioneered the exploitation of the wind on two fronts, taking advantage of the ‘Cierzo’ that blows down from the Bay of Biscay in a south-easterly direction through the Ebro Valley, and the ‘Levante’ (east) and ’Poniente’ (west) winds that blow regularly along the Strait of Gibraltar and its nearby coasts. The company’s engineers came up with innovative solutions that allowed the generation of a new type of energy to improve the planet.

THAT ‘CRAZY GANG’...

Almost 30 years after those pioneering adventures, nowadays nobody questions that wind power is – and will be even more so – a key factor in the future energy system. It will allow the human race to take on climate change and care for the planet better, putting an end to the irrational exploitation of natural resources and achieving carbon neutrality in the process.

However, three decades earlier, risky options like the one taken by those pioneers – Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, it could be said, recalling Ken Annakin’s film – were considered ‘visionary’, ‘pie-in-the-sky’, ‘testimonial’, ‘utopian’ and other similar epithets. It was an era in which installed wind power capacity worldwide was barely equivalent to that of four nuclear power stations (4,237 MW in 1995); nowadays this figure has been multiplied by 172, reaching 824,874 MW in 2021. In Spain, from the 3 MW installed on El Perdón in 1994 we now have more than 28,000 MW.

There are certain aspects engraved in the DNA of ACCIONA Energía that have always existed, such as a particular way of developing renewable energies, and these continue to be a distinguishing feature of the company, aspects such as sensitivity and transparency vis-à-vis the communities directly affected by projects. Explanatory meetings were organised to explain the project to all kinds of interest groups: ecologists, hunters, local residents or Friends of the Pilgrims Way (the route that crosses the El Perdón mountain range). Vicente Galbete’s set of sculptures on the site commissioned by ACCIONA Energía 1996 recalls the point where “the route of the wind crosses that of the stars”.

El Cabrito, the first repowering project

The case of the KW Tarifa wind farm represents another way of improving performance. The facility was equipped with a high number of low-power turbines and technology that is now obsolete. ACCIONA Energía opted for a different strategy: repowering. This meant replacing 90 wind turbines with just 12 latest-generation machines, maintaining the same capacity and increasing production by 20% thanks to the higher efficiency of the technology used. It is the first operation of this type carried out by the company and one of the first in Spain.

At the end of 2018, fourteen months after starting the disassembly of the old wind turbines, the start-up of the 12 Nordex ACCIONA Windpower turbines was completed. Eight of them have a capacity of 3 MW and the fourth 1.5 MW.

The repowering of the wind farm included improvements to the surrounding area, the restoration and revegetation of affected areas through planting, seed sowing, hydro-sowing and the recovery of embankments. By reducing the number of wind turbines, the visual impact of the wind farm and noise levels were also considerably reduced

Renamed as ‘El Cabrito’ for the place name of the area it is located, the old KW Tarifa continues to convert the power of the wind into electricity: an average of 116 GWh per year, equivalent to the electricity consumption of 30,000 homes and avoiding the emission of 51,000 tons of CO₂ to the atmosphere.

Both wind farms – El Perdón y KW Tarifa-El Cabrito – are pioneering names in the history of wind power in Spain. They also represent the present and the future, an example of the efforts of the people who have worked so hard to regenerate the planet and contribute to its decarbonisation.