Sustainable Energy and Climate Plans in Spain: FAEN’s progress inside C-Track 50

In the Asturias region of Spain, 10 Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans (SECAPs) were conducted by FAEN, the regional energy agency of Asturias, for small and medium rural municipalities which do not have enough internal resources to do it themselves. FAEN’s approach focused on preparing projects to solve specific problems encountered by the municipalities.

Asturias is a mining region with a high dependency of fossil fuels, mainly coal, and has an important economic base of electro-intensive industrial processing activities (e.g. steel, zinc, aluminium, glass, chemicals). The closure of coal mines is almost complete. The phase out of coal and coal-fired electricity generation has implications for related supply chain and service activities. Therefore, one of the main challenges for Asturian municipalities is to plan their energy transition by increasing energy efficiency and the production of renewable energy sources. This transition will also allow to create new employment opportunities.

The idea was thus to reduce the energy consumption and to transform the fossil fuels dependency in the implementation of projects where the renewable energies are the main asset. Also, the exemplary role of city councils is key to demonstrate the viability of projects to their citizens.

In all the cases, the first proposed measure was to create an office for sustainable energy and climate which will have two main tasks: preparing the projects foreseen in the SECAPs and defining dissemination actions in the municipalities, demonstrating the energy transition as a good opportunity to citizens.

All the SECAPs produced reach at least 81% of CO2 emissions reduction (86% on average) by 2050.

The planned actions address different sectors: sustainable mobility, retrofitting private and public buildings, street lighting, use of local energy resources like solar, biomass or geothermal energy, energy audits programs in the commercial sector, awareness raising activities and the development of a communication campaign on sustainable energy and climate change.

Depending on the size and specific possibilities of each municipality, the SECAPS include more or less actions (45 in average). Thanks to the existence of important subsidies in the field of public lighting (80% of the eligible costs), all municipalities have started retrofitting their public lighting systems. Other projects on building renovation and solar panels are planned in the future.