Iberdrola invests €100 M to redesign the power grid affected by the severe weather event in Valencia

Iberdrola presented in Valencia the il.lumina project, in which it is going to invest €100 M to redesign the distribution grid affected by the severe weather event 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 steps taken so far. 

In the words of Mario Ruiz-Tagle, "although the company, despite enormous difficulties, was able to get practically all electricity back online in under 72 hours, our priority now is to look to the future and to have an even more efficient distribution grid". For the Iberdrola executive, "the agile performance of the more than 500 workers mobilised from different parts of Spain and the investment in grid technology we’ve 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 contractors who will be needed, most of whom will be locally based.

The creation of a department dedicated exclusively to this plan is allowing i-DE to continue developing the rest of its investments in the Valencia Region normally.

Iberdrola began the different phases of the project at the end of 2024 with the recovery of the 132 kilovolt (kV) high voltage infrastructure in the Catadau and Carlet area and has already gathered all the material necessary to carry out the project, both in terms of transformation centres and the low and medium voltage grid, as well as substations. Its plan is to reach 90% of the project's execution in 2025 and to complete it in 2026.

Resilience measures

Eva Mancera also emphasised that electricity was brought back online in record time after the floods thanks to human and technical resources. She added that this new grid "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".

To build the electricity distribution grid of the future, the company will incorporate  resilience measures into infrastructures that involve design changes in 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 public administrations

The level of installation automation will be increased and new smart transformers (i-trafo) will be incorporated, which will improve supply quality, overhead power lines will be buried, and transformer substations will be raised and compacted.

To minimise disruption in the municipalities where work is already underway, i-DE has improved scheduled outage notifications and is implementing special measures like the installation of generators and night-time work.

In addition, the agreement between the company and the Valencian Government, through the Regional Ministry of Innovation and Industry, continues to be in force, under which it is working with the Valencian Metallurgical Business Federation (FEMEVAL) to send brigades of electrical installers to the buildings and private homes affected by the severe weather event, which are responsible for checking and repairing electrical installations and checking electrical panels, as well as addressing any needs that may arise in towns to restore public lighting.

Fast performance

The cold drop on 29 October in the province of Valencia resulted in approximately 180,000 customers losing electricity in l'Horta Sud, Catadau-Carlet and Requena-Utiel-Buñol. From the outset, i-DE mobilised approximately 500 people from both Valencia and other regions in the rest of Spain to restore service and repair the affected installations as soon as they could access them.

More than 200 people travelled on the first day (in-house and contractors) from outside the province of Valencia to provide support both in the field and to reinforce and relieve the staff operating the control centres, who had been 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 affected electricity supply in just 24 hours, 85% within 48 hours and in just over 72 hours practically everything had been restored.