Wind power slashed 4.6B euros off electricity bills in Spain last year

https://www.surinenglish.com/spain/wind-power-slashes-billion-euros-off-electricity-bills-20251217082020-nt.html

by mooreds • 6 months ago

179 65 6 months ago

Meanwhile the administration of the US says that wind farms are "losers": https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/01/09/trump-...

timeon• 6 months ago

With virtually unlimited donations they are paid to say it.

embedding-shape6• 6 months ago

Compared to solar, they are kind of noisy though. If you are used to not hearing the constant traffic "rumble" that exists almost everywhere, they add quite a lot of "rumble" themselves.

robertakarobin2• 6 months ago

Are they? I haven't noticed the sound myself, although I don't live next to windmills and just travel in areas with wind power from time to time... I also grew up next to train tracks and now live next to an interstate near an airport so may have a high tolerance for background noise!

Manfred• 6 months ago

Which is why you put them in the sea or in places with sparse population.

tensor• 6 months ago

Trump also said solar is bad.

Tade02• 6 months ago

One time I drove up to the very base of a ~2MW wind turbine.

Couldn't hear anything besides the road several hundred metres away.

edent• 6 months ago

That isn't true. We have several turbines near us. One just across the street. Even on days without traffic noise, we can't hear them.

jacquesm7• 6 months ago

What's the closest you've lived to a windfarm?

I've lived within 500 meters of a pretty large one and the highway more than a kilometer away from where I lived was far more noisy than the turbines.

tzs• 6 months ago

From that article:

“Just about all the windmills are made in China,” Trump said. “They make them and sell them to suckers like Europe and suckers like the United States before."
“All you have to do is say to China: 'How many windmill areas do you have in China?' So far they're not able to find any," he said. "They use coal and they use oil and gas and some nuclear, not much, but they don't have windmills."

It then goes on to cite data from the US Department of Energy showing how wrong Trump is.

jvdvegt• 6 months ago

Without paywall: https://archive.is/lV7Ng

gretch• 6 months ago

An interesting thing I learned from reading the article is that Spain is the 4th largest exporter of turbines behind only China, Germany, and Denmark.

Reading the other comments, it's really a shame we can't have a discussion about something happening in the world before it immediately becomes about the US, on topics that are barely relevant.

another_twist• 6 months ago

I am interested. Tell me more. Any books / articles you'd recommend ? Given that Spain made such progress, there has to be atleast an FT article.

hiccuphippo• 6 months ago

Don Quixote.

mschuster91• 6 months ago

Search for Siemens Gamesa. Siemens fused their wind power branch with them a few years prior to the pandemic and finalized the full takeover in 2022.

doctoboggan• 6 months ago

Spain is also big in the utility scale solar and storage industry with the Power Electronics company providing inverters or other components to many of the worlds largest plants.

toomuchtodo2• 6 months ago

CATL is building one of the largest battery manufacturing factories in Europe in Spain.

China battery maker CATL to train Spanish workers for battery plant - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46061492 - November 2025

mono442• 6 months ago

Did those savings actually trickle to end costumer bills? I often read how renewables are making electricity cheaper but I only pay more and more despite the share of them increasing here in electricity generation.

hvb22• 6 months ago

One reason cost might be going up is because the grid needs upgrades.

A house might have a typical peak power demand of 1kWH. Now? It might peak at 10. I'm making up these numbers by the way.

Everywhere that I know of, you pay for the grid through your bill.

zaik• 6 months ago

I'm in Austria and I pay separate bills for the grid and the electricity.

belorn• 6 months ago

The more variability there is in the grid, the more the grid need to invest in balancing, reserve energy and transmission. Each of those are expensive to build out and maintain. They are usually paid through taxes and grid fees, and here in Sweden you will generally pay more for those than for the energy that you consume.

Any saving on the production side will only effect part of the bill, and the total bill can go up even as the average wholesale price goes down.

ff_• 6 months ago

second paragraph of the article starts with:

The sector contributed 0.25% to GDP and enabled savings on consumers' electricity bills of more than 4.6 billion euros in 2024, with an average reduction in the wholesale price of close to 20 euros per MWh.

blibble2• 6 months ago

in the UK the price everyone pays is set according to the marginal price

essentially this means if there's one milliwatt of gas on the grid: everyone pays the gas price

as a result consumers see very benefit from renewables

(but the renewable generators are making out like bandits)

julosflb• 6 months ago

Yes that's sound weird but this is to make sure gas peaker plants which by definition run only a fraction of time can be profitable and be built.

zozbot234• 6 months ago

This is the right move. The marginal price is the price that balances supply and demand by definition, and this must be the case on the grid at all times, even to the last milliwatt, or you immediately get a Spain situation with cascading blackouts where huge parts of the grid go dark.

kingstnap• 6 months ago

Well we can see how much we would even expect this to matter.

For example take the 2024 Financial Report of Hydro One (distributor for Ontario) [0].

Apparently they earned 8,484M in revenue, and spent 4,143M in Power, and Net Income was 1,156M. Putting these together you can sort of conclude that the price of the electricity is around 1/2 their expenses.

If I then go to Ontario Power Generation financial reports 2024 [1], Revenue was apparently 7,187M, with Fuel Costing 1,049M, and net income around 1,006M. This sort of tells you that the price of fuel is only around 1/6th of their expenses.

I spent some time thinking about this and I'm not sure what to conclude other than probably a lot of what you pay is just paying for staff and maintenance and so even if fuel was free where I live it would be like a 1/12th change. Assuming the big savings in Wind are supposed to be from not having to pay for Fuel.

[0] https://www.hydroone.com/investorrelations/Reports/Hydro%20O...

[1] https://www.opg.com/reporting/financial-reports/

wolvoleo• 6 months ago

In Spain they probably do because the government is heavily involved in the electricity production. It's not really a free market, and it didn't have to be. In fact I'd prefer it to be more in the government's hands then it is. But Spain is a country that's much more socialist than the US and as such I'm very happy to live here.

For example when energy prices rose during the pandemic and the Ukraine war the government put limits on price increases and also lowered VAT.

ChrisArchitect• 6 months ago

Related today:

UK secures record supply of offshore wind projects

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46614777

secondcoming• 6 months ago

UK energy consumers cry

outside1234• 6 months ago

PG&E bills in California are also going down this year as well.

briandw• 6 months ago

Sarcasm? Ca electricity costs 33.60 per kWh vs the US average of 17.98. Personally Ive seen my bill double in the last 10 years.

martinpw• 6 months ago

Both are true. Costs have gone up a lot over the past few years and are also going down this year.

thedrbrian• 6 months ago

but if they go down by 1 cent per kwh then technically the price did go down.

adrr• 6 months ago

Power generation is going down, power delivery is going up. Power delivery is way more expensive than the actual electricity.

jacquesm7• 6 months ago

There are multiple comments in this thread suggesting that the outage in Spain was caused by wind power.

This has also been suggested by various politicians and others in front of a microphone or a camera without any basis in fact whatsoever. There is a (by now remote) chance that indeed wind power (or renewables in general) were the primary cause but the evidence points in an entirely different direction, the lack of control authority and undampened oscillations getting out of control. In such a situation various safety protocols dictate that sections of the grid disconnect and go into island mode or switch off altogether. This to prevent damage to the grid and to all of the grid connected devices. As these outages go, I think it was handled extremely well, the main question remaining is what the root cause was and what should be done to avoid a repetition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...

cbmuser• 6 months ago

France was not affected and guarded the rest of Europe because the have reliable, dispatchable power.

It’s not really surprising that an electricity grid becomes fragile if you remove large rotating masses which can act as power reserves which can react to power variations immediately.

jacquesm7• 6 months ago

Rotating mass is a suspect in this case, not necessarily the primary one but the lack of control authority in the presence of frequency fluctuations is the exact opposite of what you are suggesting. It means that something with a fairly large amount of source/sink capability caused a local stability issue. Almost all modern grid connected windmills are - and this may surprise you - connected to the grid using inverters because that gives them a much better chance at following the grid fluctuations than the older direct connected types did (which did have the potential to cause issues and which resulted in much higher start-up speeds than the present crop). These inverter based interconnects give response times that rotating mass based systems can only dream of, resulting in much smaller errors in phase and thus voltage tracking.

The European grid is stupendously reliable, far more reliable than any other power grid worldwide to the point that most houses and business do not have backup power plans (datacenters, hospitals, telcos and some others excepted). France is doing ok but do not pretend that without France this outage would have spread further. The Iberian peninsula has one of the weaker and heavier loaded grids in Western Europe, in spite of the above, they should have probably invested more into their infrastructure but Spain has a lot of other issues it needs to deal with which cost it a fortune every year in terms of crop losses, fires and floodings. Both Spain and Portugal (and to a lesser degree Italy and Greece) are in the line of fire when it comes to climate change damage.

toomuchtodo2• 6 months ago

Battery storage, solar, and wind can all operate as grid forming and provide synthetic inertia when provisioned to do so. Thermal grid services are not required for grid reliability.

Europe has languished on battery storage deployment, and as they rapidly deploy it, it will improve grid reliability.

https://www.energy-storage.news/energy-storage-significantly...

codingbot3000• 6 months ago

France guarding the rest of Europe, that's funny! The connection had to be dropped because it did not have the capacity to supply Spain with enough power at that moment. And the connection is so small, because the French do not want competition from cheaper Spanish power generators.

miduil2• 6 months ago

I did not mean to suggest that the outage in Spain and Portugal were caused by wind power or just renewables.

It's more related to me in terms of when you look at the economical impact of energy, what sizes are in play. Just reading 4.6B Euro is a bit vague to understand to me, at least without having that put into perspective.

Another topic that has been surfacing every now and then is Electricity theft, partially for in-door cannabis plantation in occupied apartments. Which Endesa is valued 2B Euro per year.

https://www.endesa.com/en/press/press-room/news/energy-secto...

Generally renewables do pose new challenges onto the grid, unfortunately conservatives/fascists are using that for FUD - making a technical conversation harder on that topic.

https://www.brattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2025-Iber...

Even in the hypothetical scenario that renewable energy being more expensive than fossil energy (in production), the climate catastrophe and the impact of that on the economy is undeniable magnitudes bigger than any investment we could currently do to shift quicker stronger to renewable resources.

jacquesm7• 6 months ago

Spain will need to make some very hard choices, they have a relatively - by European standards - fragile grid and some weak interconnects. This situation has been flagged years ago but so far priorities have been to do other things first. The outage has definitely given people food for thought and I expect that when the final report is presented that it will come with some recommendations on how to prevent future recurrence. In particular the voltage / frequency regulation aspect of some of the local grids will become a focal point because these have the potential to destabilize much larger sections than just their own. The real puzzler to me is that there were multiple signals of pending grid instability and no action was taken when they easily could have, this is the bit that I'm most interested in learning about.

I look at energy companies about twice every year in some detail and I know that the typical grid operator is extremely careful and pro-active on this subject (at least, in NL and Germany, my work area, they are), the energy market has introduced some potential for abuse and for instability but so far that seems to be under control. Which makes me quite curious about what the root cause here was.

lentil_soup• 6 months ago

It's fascinating to see the live electricity sources with Electricity Maps.

Here is Spain: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/

Throughout the day you can clearly see how the wind and sun power starts kicking in, when it's raining hydro raises, etc.

booi• 6 months ago

That's interesting because here in California, $4.6B is slashed off productivity because of wind.

- still angry at pg&e

ihaveajob• 6 months ago

Can you elaborate? Was that sarcasm?

Sabinus• 6 months ago

The surinenglish.com site denies access if you don't give consent for personalised advertising cookies on the GDPR consent screen.

gregbot• 6 months ago

I was curious to see how this number was derived and unfortunately the 20.41 euro/MWh “reducing effect” figure has absolutely no explanation as to how it was calculated. Given that AEE is a wind industry lobbying organization I suspect this number is picked in a way that is maximally favorable to wind. I really wish they would tell us how this number was arrived at so I could make up my own mind as to how reasonable it is.

throw_m239339• 6 months ago

It slashed a lot of birds too...

Wind power slashed 4.6B euros off electricity bills in Spain last year

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