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Technology and sustainability to say goodbye to carbon in Gran Canaria

A project will convert the power of water into a large battery to provide electricity

Have you ever been to the Canary Islands? Beautiful territory, paradisiacal views, and a perfect climate for thinking about nothing, especially work. But there is a problem: the Canary Islands, due to their location, have to rely almost entirely on the import of fossil fuels, stored in large containers that, from time to time, cross the coasts to allow its inhabitants, mostly tourists, to have electricity and other services that use energy. Then, all of a sudden, the idea: “What if we turned our most natural reserve of energy, the sea, into a huge eco-sustainable battery?”. And this is how the ‘El Salto de Chira‘ project was born in Gran Canaria.

It is a reversible or pumped hydroelectric plant based on exploiting the difference in height between the upper (Chira) and lower (Soria) basins of Gran Canaria to store renewable energy in the form of water. The project is a response to combat the climate emergency in one of the territories suffering the most from its negative effects. Indeed, 90 per cent of Gran Canaria’s territory is at high or very high risk of desertification, where haze and droughts are becoming more frequent and rising sea levels may bring golden beaches to a standstill.

One of the main sources of polluting emissions in the Canary Islands is the production of electricity from fossil fuels. El Salto de Chira, with its innovative design, will put Gran Canaria at the forefront of sustainability by reducing CO2 emissions by 20 per cent and generating 3,500 ‘green’ jobs related to clean energy and climate change mitigation.

The project

The main environmental impact of pumped storage hydroelectric plants is the construction of the dams, which in this case have been in place for more than half a century; therefore, the impact is much less than in other similar projects. Taking advantage of the existing dams, the initiative, presented in 2021 and now in its start-up phase, will ensure the protection of the Canary Islands’ environmental, landscape and ethnographic values. The local body, the Cabildo de Gran Canaria, will take advantage of the work to implement an environmental restoration plan aimed at compensating for the impacts of the ‘water battery’ and eliminating invasive flora and improving the current state of nature conservation. In addition, the constant volume of water in the dams will have beneficial effects on the entire ecosystem.

Milan
Milan

The energy transition, i.e. the transition from a fossil-fuel-based energy system to one based on renewable energy, requires a large storage capacity. The two main technologies for storing energy are batteries and hydroelectric power plants (although others are under study, such as hydrogen). Salto de Chira will store 16 hours of energy per 200 MW of installed power, which is much more than the current maximum storage of the world’s largest lithium battery, which is just over an hour. Conventional batteries are complementary, but most use minerals from poor countries and would continue to make economies dependent on the extraction of rare piles of the earth (we discussed this here). In short, batteries are more expensive, less efficient and more polluting than the power plant and do not benefit from the excess water of this project.

Eco-sustainable islands

The Canary Islands have significantly intensified their decarbonization efforts in the last five years. The largest renewable energy complex in the archipelago, consisting of eight wind farms and 12 solar power plants, was inaugurated in 2022 and provided enough energy for about 54,000 households. The Spanish government and the European Union will support the development of 65 new solar projects in the Canary Islands with EUR 20 million by the end of next year. The archipelago is also exploring alternatives such as wave energy, with the first pilot project of this kind launched in February, led by Danish start-up Wavepiston. Key to the success of all these projects, says a study from the country, will be the implementation of sufficient energy storage solutions to stabilize the grid during peak demand and the construction of maritime cables to connect the islands.

As European countries push towards coal neutrality, adopting energy storage solutions to balance the intermittent supply of renewables and increase energy security is becoming increasingly urgent. According to the European Energy Storage Association (EASE), the EU will need 200 GW of storage by the decade’s end and 600 GW by 2050.

Antonino Caffo has been involved in journalism, particularly technology, for fifteen years. He is interested in topics related to the world of IT security but also consumer electronics. Antonino writes for the most important Italian generalist and trade publications. You can see him, sometimes, on television explaining how technology works, which is not as trivial for everyone as it seems.