Acciona will repower several wind farms located in Tahivilla

Little by little, new repowering projects are arriving in the Spanish wind farm fleet. A sector that will see quite a bit of movement in the coming years after the ministry (through IDAE) granted a package of aid.

Among the winners of these grants, Acciona Energía has been one of the first to publicly announce its repowering project. It concerns the Tahivilla Wind Farms (Río Almodóvar, El Gallego, La Manga, El Ruedo, and Cortijo de Iruelas) located in Cadiz, near Tarifa. One of the areas in the peninsula with the best wind resource.

The figures are quite impressive:

  • The wind farms will transition from being composed of 98 wind turbines (MADE AE-5X of 800 kW) to 13 Nordex turbines (N163 and N175 in 5.X and 6.X versions).
  • Some turbines will reach a nominal power of 7 MW. Unless someone beats them to it, they would be the most powerful installed in Spain.
  • Some turbines will be the N175 model, which again, unless someone beats them to it, will have the largest rotors installed in Spain.
  • The installed capacity will increase from 78.4 MW to 84.4 MW, while the evacuation capacity will remain the same. This suggests that evacuation infrastructure will be reused as much as possible.
  • Once repowered, the parks’ production will increase by 72%. A spectacular figure.
  • The tower heights of the N163 will be 159 and 148 meters, probably due to site suitability issues (depending on the location, low towers can pose a problem with turbulence). I believe the 159 meter tower will be the tallest in Spain once installed. For the N175, I couldn’t find the data.

The Tahivilla repowering project has received €8.3 million from the circular repowering program.

Coincidence or not, if I’m not mistaken, one of the wind turbines will not need to be dismantled, as it is the unit that collapsed a couple of months ago, and the video went viral.

The figures of this repowering project are perfectly understood at a glance thanks to the infographic published by Kiko Maza on his LinkedIn account.

For the curious ones, here are links to two of the projects presented to the administration (in Spanish):

Sergio Fdez Munguía

Windletter #81