APPA Biomass requests specific auctions for its technology

APPA Biomasa requests that the regulation of the auction announced by the Ministry of Energy contemplate, due to its specificity, the fit of biomass, biogas and renewable waste installation projects, while denouncing that the proposed methodology excludes, in fact, the installations of biomass, by not considering those generation plants that have remuneration assigned to the operation.

For this reason, the APPA Biomass section requests auctions differentiated by renewable technologies or by manageability and that the current limitation on production hours with the right to receive remuneration for the operation be eliminated. For the biomass association, the articulation should specifically address waste management and consider the distributed nature of renewable energies.

“If the terms of the draft auction are not corrected, technologies such as biomass, which provides great socioeconomic and environmental benefits, will be left out of the same, and the important biomass resources that our country has will be wasted,” said Manuel García. , president of APPA Biomass.

The auction excludes biomass
For APPA Biomasa, the auction discriminates against biomass sources such as renewable municipal waste (50% of the energy value) and black liquor from the paper manufacturing industry. In fact, the terms of the auction, he maintains, completely exclude facilities that, like biomass, have remuneration assigned to the operation. As they are not considered in the auction, biomass installations cannot compete on equal terms with other renewable technologies.

The proposal implies the impossibility of having efficient and well-managed biomass facilities, as required by the Electricity Sector Law, since the remuneration parameters established for the reference standard installation are not real.

Auctions by technology or by manageability
Given the proposed scheme of a technologically neutral auction and supposedly open to all renewable technologies, APPA Biomasa requests a change to auctions that differentiate renewable technologies from each other, either independently (such as the first auction aimed at biomass and wind ) or together (on the one hand, manageable technologies and on the other, non-manageable). In this way, an orderly development of renewable power in Spain would be guaranteed, in accordance with energy planning consistent with the existing renewable resources in Spain and with the climate change and energy objectives to which the Government has committed itself.

The holding of separate auctions for different technologies is permitted by the European Commission itself when it is duly justified to do so, as in December 2016 it allowed Germany to organize separate auctions for different renewable technologies to keep its electricity grid stable. Simply citing the need to guarantee new manageable and non-manageable renewable power in Spain to balance the future renewable electricity mix, differentiated auctions could be carried out without breaching the Guidelines on state aid in matters of environmental protection and energy 2014-2020 .

Do not limit the number of production hours
The current regulations, as a result of the reform of the electricity sector, contain a limitation on the equivalent hours of production of biomass and biogas plants with the right to receive remuneration for the operation, which is set at 6,500 hours, when these facilities are projected to produce more than 7,500 hours. The proposed auction reduces the maximum value of equivalent hours of operation of biomass plants with the right to remuneration for the operation to 5,000 hours.

If the Government really intends to meet the energy objectives derived from Directives (such as the Renewable Energy Directive 2009/28/EC) or reduce the energy cost and foreign energy dependency by establishing this auction, the most immediate and efficient way to do so is allow biomass facilities that are already in operation (investments already undertaken) to produce the maximum number of hours for which they were sized, instead of keeping them limited and even attempting to limit them even more.