With over 300 days of sunshine a year, Costa Tropical could have been named Costa Soleada, so it's ideal for harvesting solar energy.
Salobreña, for example, wants to sell solar-generated electricity to its residents and become the vanguard amongst the comunidades energéticas, which are associations created to share the energy generated with a municipality. The Town Hall considers that it has enough solar panels installed to be able supply residents.
There are solar panels, for example on the Town Hall building, on the sports pavilion, on school buildings, on the Auditorium, the pensioners’ home, to be followed shortly by another 11 locations within the town.
For this reason the Town Hall wants to meet with the Ministerio de Transición Ecológica y Reto Demográfico to see how it can legally sell excess energy to its residents; i.e., 12,477 inhabitants. The earnings from this would go towards improvements around town.
Take, for instance, the Town Hall, which is open from 08.00h to 15.00h but during the rest of the daylight hours energy is being generated that is not being used. This surplus could be sold to comunidades energéticas, explained the Mayor, María Eugenia Rufino.
“We’re ahead of the game because no mayor has suggested what we have; self supply the town,” she said, adding, “the law originally permited selling it within a radius of 500 but metres now the radius has be extended to one kilometre from the point where the solar-generated energy is produced; this would cover most of the municipality.”
She said that if it goes ahead then the Town Hall could supply electricity at a cheaper rate than the electricity companies, thus bringing down power bills.
She went on to explain: “for example, if you are paying 100 euros in electricity bills, we can give you [electricty] for 50 euros, but instead of giving a 50-euro discount, we would charge 10 euros as a tax to be spent on improvements around town.”
She also said that Salobreña is the only municipality within the province that generates so much electricity that the surplus could be sold. She added that comunidades energéticas wouldn’t need to find space to place their own solar panels because the Town Halls has more than enough.
(News: Salobrena, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)