The Government of the Canary Islands has officially endorsed the legality of the San Bartolomé Wind Farm and has dismissed the request for review filed by the company Renovertis against the project promoted by the public company INALSA, after analyzing the legal and technical arguments defended by the public entity during the administrative procedure.
The resolution, published this week in the Official Gazette of the Canary Islands, rejects the petition for annulment of Decree 159/2018 and all other authorizations linked to the wind farm, concluding that no grounds for nullity exist in the processing carried out for more than a decade.
The company Renovertis intended for the Government of the Canary Islands to declare the entire administrative procedure of the wind farm null and void, including the authorization of the project.
No preferential treatment
The reason that led the applicant to seek the nullity of Decree 159/2018 was based on what it calls preferential treatment for the San Bartolomé Wind Farm compared to the processing required for the installation of a wind farm with two wind turbines in Las Caletas, which in the previous legislature the Canary Islands Government declared of public utility without subsequently obtaining authorization due to not passing the environmental processing.
Nor did Renovertis take into account that the authorization procedure for the San Bartolomé W.F. is covered by Decree 383/2015, of December 28, issued by the Government of the Canary Islands at the proposal of the Ministry of Economy, Industry, Trade and Knowledge, which excludes certain Wind Farm projects from the ordinary environmental impact assessment procedure, by establishing environmental conditions to correctly characterize the environmental impact of the project, and to avoid or minimize it.
The allegations presented by the public company were decisive in the final decision adopted by the Government of the Canary Islands, which includes in the decree itself the legal reasoning defended by INALSA to conclude that the omission of the legally established procedure did not occur, as argued by the applicant company, and therefore, there was no cause for nullity by operation of law.
“This park does not belong to private interests alien to the Island, but to a public company that works to guarantee a more sustainable energy future and less dependence on external sources,” according to the president of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, Oswaldo Betancort.
For his part, the counselor responsible for the Wind Energy area, Domingo Cejas, adds that “INALSA has maintained a firm and solvent defense of the project from day one, providing legal and technical arguments that have finally been supported by the Government of the Canary Islands itself”.
9.2 megawatts of clean energy
The president of the Cabildo, Oswaldo Betancort, assures that the P.E. San Bartolomé “became one of the key challenges at the beginning of my term, because when I arrived at the Corporation in 2023 the wind turbines remained stored gathering dust at the port of Naos” after the project obtained a negative environmental report in June 2023, a circumstance that caused an additional extra expense of half a million euros for storage.
After unblocking the administrative processing, a favorable report was obtained in April and in November 2024 the park was already installed.
In its defense of the project, INALSA argued not only that the park had met the required environmental conditions, but also warned of the serious economic, energy, and environmental consequences that paralyzing a strategic infrastructure for Lanzarote would have.
The installation, supply, and maintenance of the San Bartolomé wind farm were awarded in June 2022 to the company Elecnor, the same one that executed the Teguise I and Arrecife parks, with a budget of almost 12 million euros in investment through financing from the FDCAN, Canary Islands Development Fund.
The Minister of Finance, Contracting, Planning and Project Coordination, María Jesús Tovar, welcomes the decision of the Government of the Canary Islands and highlights “the importance of FDCAN funds being a fundamental tool in the development of clean energies in Lanzarote”.
The San Bartolomé Wind Farm, located in the El Monte area of that municipality, is entirely public, has four wind turbines with a power of 9.2 megawatts, and “is already a reality, it is in operation, generating clean energy with the capacity to supply electricity to about 5,000 homes, increasing the penetration of renewable energies in Lanzarote, according to the counselor for Renewable Energies, Domingo Cejas.
Lanzarote currently has, through the five wind farms of Arrecife, Teguise I, San Bartolomé, Punta Grande and Los Valles, a wind power of 40.7 MW, which means that, at specific moments, 35 percent of all the energy consumed in the Lanzarote-Fuerteventura electrical system comes from this clean energy.
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