The Spanish Gas Association (Sedigás) has welcomed this Friday with a favorable assessment the launch of the capacity market in the peninsular electrical system, although it has urged the Government to convene the auctions as soon as possible and to specify the regulatory development that allows ensuring the economic viability of combined cycle plants as backup for the system.
The organization that groups the gas industry understands that this decision, approved by the Executive after almost six years of processing, constitutes "a step that recognizes a reality": the need to have firm and manageable power to guarantee supply security against the intermittency of renewable energies.
The order from the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge designs a centralized scheme of firm power auctions in which producers, storage facilities, consumers, and demand aggregators can participate.
According to Sedigás, its entry into force responds to the warnings from Red Eléctrica de España (REE) and the European Network of Transmission System Operators (ENTSO-e), which since 2023 have been detecting coverage deficit risks higher than the reliability standards set by regulation.
"We have been pointing out for years that the electrical system needs a capacity mechanism to remunerate the firm power that supports renewables. The approval of this order is good news and a step that recognizes a reality: without available combined cycles, the supply security of the Spanish electrical system is at risk," stated the president of Sedigás, Joan Batalla, in a statement.
CLAIMS CLARIFICATIONS ON COEFFICIENTS AND EMISSIONS
Despite its support for the general framework, the gas employers' association insists that the real effectiveness of this market will depend on how the development rules are specified and on the speed with which the first auctions are convened.
In this regard, Sedigás demands that the determination of the "firmness coefficients" adequately reflect the specific contribution of combined cycles compared to other technologies with a lower degree of availability.
In the environmental plan, the regulation establishes that existing plants must certify a maximum of 550 grams of fossil CO2 per kilowatt hour, but at the same time it contemplates global emission limits in the main auctions that, as the association warns, could exclude plants that do meet the individual threshold.
For this reason, Sedigás demands that the application of these caps be consistent with the need to have the effective firm capacity that the system requires.
Furthermore, the entity points out that the current regulation does not incorporate a defined procedure for closure or hibernation for the plants that participate in the auctions and do not receive awards, thus generating a scenario of economic uncertainty.
To this factor is added that a service provision period of twelve months is set for existing installations, a time horizon that the employers' association qualifies as "insufficient" to provide visibility to large-scale investments or to projects for extending the useful life.
In this context, the association representing the gas sector in Spain has asked the Government to accelerate the approval of the pending development regulation and define the operating procedure in order to launch the auctions as quickly as possible.