The Government has decided to more than double the electrical power planned for the Community of Madrid, with an increase of 6.5 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity that will place the region as the second autonomous community that will receive the most additional power, only behind Aragón.
Almost half of that new power, around 3 GW of the 6.5 GW scheduled, will be reserved to cover the demand of new housing developments in the region.
Currently, the Community of Madrid produces about 4% of the energy it consumes and imports nearly 96% of the remaining, with a peak demand of 4.8 GW and another 4.1 GW already authorized on the available grid that are not yet being used.
At this moment, the free capacity of the existing networks is committed at 50% for data processing centers (DPC) --compared to the 28% average in Spain--, 15% for industrial uses, and less than 10% for residential use.
To accommodate this increase in power, the plan foresees reinforcing and building new electrical lines with neighboring communities, optimizing the internal flow of energy, raising nine additional substations, and expanding more than a dozen of the already operational ones.
The proposal incorporates all the positions and supports in the network that the Community of Madrid had requested as essential in the residential area looking towards 2030, which will make it the autonomous community with the highest number of support points for distribution to connect urban and industrial developments.
In addition, the total volume of investment associated with this planning multiplies by more than three the amount collected in the previous plan corresponding to the period 2015-2020.
These actions were discussed in a meeting held this Monday between the Secretary of State for Energy, Joan Groizard, and the Deputy Minister of Environment, Agriculture, and Interior of the Community of Madrid, Rafael García González, in which the changes introduced in the proposal of the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge after receiving 2,566 allegations were analyzed.
The meeting is part of a round of contacts with the autonomous governments, organized following the protocol order, to convey the final adjustments of the electrical planning within its official processing.
The Community warns of more than 160,000 homes at risk due to lack of energy
The Community of Madrid has been warning for some time about the energy planning of the central Executive, which, in its opinion, does not ensure supply for new urban developments, and estimates that 166,000 public housing units could be compromised due to lack of energy by 2030.
This concern led the regional Administration to sit down with the central Government to address the problem, although, after the call for general elections, those conversations were put on hold, as admitted by the Minister of Environment, Agriculture, and Interior, Carlos Novillo, in a meeting with journalists.
From the Madrid Executive, they have insisted that the distribution plan for the period 2025-2030 "is already too late" for urban needs, and that developments in the metropolitan southeast, such as Valdecarros, Los Berrocales, or Los Ahijones, were excluded despite totaling around 100,000 housing units.
The Community previously submitted objections to this planning that went "unanswered." Therefore, the regional Government observes with "concern" and "anger" the "unprecedented" possibility in Spain of building homes that, however, cannot connect to the electrical grid.