Iberdrola invests 100 million euros in redesigning the electricity grid affected by the DANA
Iberdrola has presented in Valencia the il.lumina project, in which it is going to invest 100 million euros to redesign the electricity distribution network affected by the DANA on 29 October in the province. The CEO of Iberdrola España, Mario Ruiz-Tagle, accompanied by Eva Mancera, the CEO of i-DE, Iberdrola's distribution company, detailed the company's investment plan and the actions undertaken so far.
In the words of Mario Ruiz-Tagle, ‘although the company, despite the enormous difficulties, was able to restore practically the entire electricity supply in less than 72 hours, it is now a priority to look to the future and to have an even more efficient distribution network’. For the Iberdrola executive, ‘the agile performance of the more than 500 workers mobilised and brought in from different parts of Spain and the investment in grid technology made in recent years were decisive in those exceptional circumstances’.
The company has now created a team of 35 people who are dedicated exclusively to the il.lumina project, which is divided into five operational areas under the same management and has seven support areas to coordinate the work of the approximately 1,000 workers from contractor companies that will be needed, most of whom will be locally based.
The creation of a department dedicated exclusively to this plan is enabling i-DE to continue to develop the rest of its investments in the Valencia region normally.
With regard to the execution period, Iberdrola has already started at the end of 2024 with the different phases of the project with the recovery of the 132 kilovolt (kV) high voltage infrastructure in the area of Catadau and Carlet and has already gathered all the necessary material to be able to develop it, both in the section of transformation centres and low and medium voltage network, as well as in the substations.
The forecast is to reach 90% of the project's execution in 2025 and to complete it in 2026.
Resilience measures
Eva Mancera also emphasised that the supply was recovered in record time after the floods thanks to human and technical resources. She added that this new network ‘will be even more robust and resilient, prepared for extreme phenomena that may occur in the future and will be implemented in a few months thanks to the creation of a specific project team that will allow i-DE to continue developing the rest of its investments in the Valencia region’.
In order to build an electricity distribution grid of the future, the company is going to incorporate resilience measures into the infrastructures that involve design changes to the assets and will equip them with the latest digitalisation standards that will benefit 650,000 customers, all in coordination with the actions carried out by the different public administrations.
The level of automation of the facilities will be increased and new intelligent transformers (i-trafo) will be incorporated, which will increase the quality of supply, and overhead power lines will be buried, and transformer substations will be raised and compacted.
To minimise disruption in the municipalities in which work is already underway, i-DE has introduced improvements to scheduled outage notifications and is implementing special measures such as the installation of generators and night-time work.
In addition, the agreement between the company and the Generalitat Valenciana, through the Department of Innovation and Industry, continues to be in force, through which it is collaborating with the Valencian Metallurgical Business Federation (FEMEVAL) to send brigades of electrical installers to buildings and private homes affected by the DANA, who are responsible for the review and repair of electrical installations and the checking of electrical panels, as well as the needs that may arise in the various municipalities with the restoration of service to public lighting.
Rapid action
The DANA that occurred on 29 October in the province of Valencia caused approximately 180,000 customers to be without electricity supply in the areas of l'Horta Sud, Catadau-Carlet and Requena-Utiel-Buñol. From the outset, i-DE mobilised approximately 500 people from both the Valencia region and other regions in the rest of Spain to restore the service and repair the affected installations as access to them became possible.
More than 200 people travelled on the first day (own and contractor companies) from outside the province of Valencia to provide support both in field work and to reinforce and relieve the staff operating the control centres, which were cut off.
The company's rapid action and mobilisation of all the resources at its disposal, including the installation of more than 120 generators, made it possible to recover approximately half of the affected electricity supply in barely 24 hours, 85% within 48 hours and in just over 72 hours practically everything had been restored.