Iberdrola has launched one of its main projects in Portugal: a hydroelectric gigabatterie, with three dams and three power stations, with a capacity of nearly 1,160 megawatts (MW). The company inaugurated this Monday the project located in the city of Tâmega, which involved an investment of 1,500 million euros and whose construction lasted eight years.
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The hydroelectric mega-complex is located east of Porto and was inaugurated by the Prime Minister of Portugal, António Costa, and the president of Iberdrola, Ignacio Sánchez Galán. The Tâmega gigabatterie is considered the largest clean energy project developed in Portugal. It is made up of three reservoirs, with reversible pumping capacity, and three plants (Alto Tâmega, Daivões and Gouvães), which will mean a 6% increase in the installed capacity of the neighboring country.
In concrete terms, the Tâmega electro-production system is capable of storing 40 million kWh, the equivalent of the energy consumed by 11 million people at home for 24 hours, making it one of the largest storage systems energy in Europe.
This reversible pumping capacity means that it can store energy to be used, for example, during peak periods and will, as Iberdrola explained, avoid the import of more than 160,000 tonnes of oil. per year.
Dialogue with the Portuguese government
During the inauguration, the president of Iberdrola stressed that the development of the Tâmega project has been possible thanks to the environment of legal stability and good dialogue achieved by the Portuguese government in recent years. In addition, he indicated that this infrastructure shows that the two main objectives of European energy policy, energy independence and decarbonization, are perfectly compatible when working on the electrification of the economic and productive system.
Ignacio Sánchez Galán also announced that the company will be able to double the investments made in the gigabatterie in the coming years, reaching 3,000 million euros, which it will allocate to new wind and solar parks already in development or in construction. From the outset, the future construction of two wind farms connected to the gigabatterie will be added to the project.
Precisely, the Portuguese Prime Minister underlined the country’s commitment to renewable energies to reduce its dependence on foreign sources. An investment in recent years of 17 billion euros which has enabled them to have “zero” dependence on Russia.
“We are going to be in solidarity, but solidarity also means that we are not going to make the Portuguese pay to compensate for the delay in which others have put themselves when they could have made an investment in renewable energies of 17,000 million what we did,” he said. insured.Coast.