Acciona Green Energy Developments, a subsidiary of the Acciona Group, was the biggest retailer of 100% renewable electricity in Spain last year, according to data published by the Spanish National Commission on Markets and Competition (CNMC) on the System to Guarantee the Origin and Labelling of Electricity for 2017.

Act 3/2013 attributes the management of the Guarantee of Origin Regime (GdO) to the CNMC. It is a voluntary mechanism that certifies, following a request by an interested party, that a certain amount of electricity has been obtained from renewable energy sources or high-efficiency cogeneration, similarly to the Renewable Energy Certificates in other European countries.

The report approved by the Regulatory Oversight Chamber of the CNMC last April 5^th certified, for yet another year, that the origin of all the energy supplied by Acciona Green to its customers is 100% renewable as it has sufficient guarantees of origin. Furthermore, the energy is generated by the Group’s own renewables facilities.

According to this report, Acciona Green provided its customers in Spain with Guarantees of Origin for a total of 5,309 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electric power, free of charge. This figure represents 16.4% of the electricity with this kind of guarantee supplied to customers in Spain.

It also transferred another 964 GWh under the Guarantee of Origin Regime to energy retailers in other Member States of the European Union, a possibility envisaged in the legislation.

“Corporate clients increasingly demand energy of certified renewable origin to comply with their sustainability policies and reduce their carbon footprint, which gives us a competitive advantage in a market that is ever more sensitive to the fight against climate change”, says Acciona Green Director Santiago Gómez Ramos. “Our position is clear in this respect: we only generate and sell renewable energy, both in Spain and in 13 other countries around the world”.

Unique on the Ibex-35

Acciona is the only company listed on the Ibex-35, the reference stock market index in Spain, that only generates and markets energy of renewable origin. This means that the CNMC is able to grant it an ‘A’ grading every year, indicating the lowest environmental impact on a scale from A to G, because its electricity generation does not produce CO2 emissions or radioactive waste.

The report by the CNMC states that the Guarantee of Origin Regime represented 30.4% of total national electricity production in 2017, and 70.7% of the amount generated from renewable sources and cogeneration.

The Guarantee of Origin Regime has seen exponential growth in Spain. In 2010, three years after it was set up, the number of electricity generation plants within it was 7,644 (according to figure from the CNMC), while in 2017 it reached 36,659, almost five times more. The number of consumers has undergone a similar evolution (calculated on the number of supply points), going from 393,000 in 2010 to 1,909,872 last year.

The CNMC’s report shows a reduction in the contribution of renewables in the Spanish electric power mix against the previous year from 39.8% to 32%, mainly due to lower inputs from hydropower stations, a higher participation of fossil-fuel technologies (coal and gas) and, to a lesser extent, nuclear power. The result was an increase in CO2 emissions, from 0.25 kg/kWh in 2016 to 0.31 kg/MWh in 2017. The generation of high-level radioactive waste also increased, from 0.51 mg/kWh in 2016 to 0.54 mg/kWh last year.