The Council of Ministers has again double this maximum distance allowed for self-consumption until reaching 2,000 meterswithin the third package of anti-inflation measures announced by the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, as reported by the Ministry for Ecological Transition. Until the end of summer, the distance between the photovoltaic power plants and the consumers that use them was 500 meters. In October the Government extended it to 1,000 meters and this Tuesday they have increased that measure again.
“The door is open to more shared self-consumptionto the interaction between the industrial estate and the city, to allow those who have a bad roof to share with those who have plenty of it”, the director of Energy and Environment of the El Prat de Llobregat City Council celebrated on Twitter, Joan Herrera, one of the great drivers of this change. Another of the supporters of the measure is the ERC deputy, John Capdevila, who has defended that this measure “is a triumph of those who fight for the democratization and sustainability of energy” through a statement.
This extension of the radius of action of collective self-consumption up to 2,000 meters includes not only the rooftop photovoltaic installationsas up to now, but also to those in industrial floor or through the artificial structures “whose main objective is not to generate electricity”, such as photovoltaic pergolas. For Capdevila, in this way, the door “really” opens to self-consumption in urban areas and makes sure “that many pueblos can share self-consumption throughout the municipality”.
The more distance there is between the point of generation and the point of use, the more consumers can benefit from this technology. And hence the interest of the renewable sector and of the political parties with ERC at the helm to extend collective self-consumption to urbanizations and industrial estates and allow those who do not have a roof surface to install their panels to also self-consume through an installation at 2,000 meters away.
However, this measure has not always been to the taste of the Pedro Sánchez government, which until this summer was reticent. Among the reasons that were alluded to was that if the distance was extended too much, it was not efficient due to the losses of Energy in low voltage networks the greater the distance that separates the place of production from the place of consumption.
The giro of the Government arrived at the beginning of the autumn, when the extension to 1,000 meters was incorporated into the contingency plan and weeks later it was the third vice president and minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, who announced that this limit would be increased again until the 2,000 meters. “We are sensitive to the new demands,” said Ribera in the commission of the branch of the Congress of Deputies.