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The Spanish wind industry faces its coup de grâce for the very same reason that the wind industry is on the ropes in the UK, Germany, the US, here and elsewhere: either the massive subsidies that have driven the greatest fraud of all time have actually been cut; or there’s the inevitable prospect that they will be, very soon.

In Spain’s case, its government worked out long-ago that pouring never ending €billions into a meaningless power source – that has no commercial value – was never going to end well, on any level – political, social or economic.

While the wind industry – wherever it plies its subsidy soakedTRADE – deludes itself that the principles of economics are suspended in relation to it, once the massive (and seemingly endless) subsidies go, so does the interest of power retailers, bankers and investors. Funny about that …

SpainINSTALLED No Wind Power for First Time Since 80s in 2015
Bloomberg
Alex Morales
26 January 2016

Spain didn’tINSTALL a single megawatt of wind power capacity in 2015, the first time the industry has had a dead year since the 1980s.

TotalINSTALLED capacity stalled at 22,988 megawatts, with wind covering 19 percent of power demand in Spain last year, the Spanish Wind Energy Association, known by its Spanish initials AEE, said Tuesday in a statement. Just 27 megawatts of new capacity has beenINSTALLEDsince 2013, when a new payments system was introduced.

Spanish renewable energy companies that once reaped Europe’s biggest subsidies have looked abroad for projects since the domesticMARKETstagnated following a moratorium on support for new wind farms and solar parks in 2012. The standstill has left Spain needing an additional 6,400 megawatts of wind energy capacity by 2020 in order to meet binding European renewables targets, according to the association.

“TheINSTALLATION of more than 6,000 megawatts of wind power in four years has been done in Spain before thanks to regulations that favored it,” the association said. “If certain aspects of the regulations were modified to give confidence back to investors and ease access to financing, it could be attempted again.”

The industry group called on the government to consult with the wind sector on changes to auctioning arrangements, after an initial 500-megawatt auction yielded no subsidy for the technology. It said that was an “unexpected result that brought even more uncertainty to the already complicated situation of the wind sector.”

The association called for an end to provisions in rules that allow the government to change the reasonable returns for projects every six years. It also said the government should hold auctions for the remaining 5,900 megawatts of wind power it needs as soon as possible.
Bloomberg

Remember all that wind industry guff about the world hungering for wind power; how it’s free and getting cheaper all the time; and how it’s the ‘plug and play’ solution to our future electricity needs?

No? It seems Spaniards have forgotten it too.