Reborn by the wind

“Being together, having the whole town participate in a collective meeting, reinforces the feeling of community,” says Carmen Pérez, who runs the bar-restaurant in Hornillos de Cerrato (Palencia), during a short break from work, still stifled by the hustle and bustle of the clientele that crowds her establishment in this hot July. In the nearby “Alfonso Pérez Marco” pavilion, the entire town, the epicentre of empty Spain, participates in a popular paella with more than 150 guests.

The arrival of wind power “has marked a turning point” for the municipality of Hornillos, less than 30 kilometres from the capital of Palencia, confesses its mayor, Ignacio Valdeolmillos.

The benefits obtained thanks to wind power are palpable here. Residents have a taxi available 24 hours a day to go to the doctor’s office, paying two euros for the trip to Palencia. They also enjoy a subsidy for fibre internet; schoolchildren receive 100 euros for books and school supplies and there are many excursions and popular meals. But, above all, residents are proud of their new hallmarks: swimming pool, paddle tennis court, mini-golf, zip lines… “And we couldn’t have all that without wind power,” says Mayor Ignacio Valdeolmillos.

Tax revenues paid by wind turbines sometimes account for half of the municipal budget.

65% of the Town Hall’s budget (350,000 of the 550,000 euros per year) comes from income from the installation of wind turbines in the municipality, which has 40 windmills (22 of them on municipal land). “All this has allowed the town to grow, to start functioning, to receive visitors and to face one of the problems of empty Spain, which is the lack of services,” says the mayor, who is expressive and optimistic when describing the “abysmal change in the town.”

From emptied Spain to hopeful Spain

The result is that in just 9 years the population has almost doubled, going from 110 to 180 registered residents. “This month we have registered five more people,” says the mayor euphorically. Each new registration is like a victory against depopulation in a province that has been bleeding demographically. “Empty Spain has become hopeful Spain,” says the mayor of Hornillos euphorically, upon receiving the Eolo award from the Wind Energy Business Association.

“We have more and more clients,” says Carmen Pérez, who left Almería 10 years ago and moved here with her children. Today, she is used to serving the wind farm employees (around thirty of them, including maintenance technicians, team leaders, office workers, etc.), among other clients.

Victor Arroyo, mayor of Herrera de Valdecañas (160 inhabitants, with 30 windmills), is similarly optimistic, hopeful to see former neighbours returning to the town now thanks to the services provided.

Depopulation continues, but it has slowed down a bit

Victor ArroyoMayor of Herrera de Valdecañas, in Palencia

The income from taxes and the rental of land for the wind turbines allows the Town Hall to collect 180,000 euros of its 450,000 euro budget, which has allowed it to repave the streets, improve the water services, support the internet service, create a cultural centre, organise camps for children or offer free excursions to residents. They even plan to build swimming pools and close their sports facility. “Depopulation continues, but it has slowed down a little,” summarises Víctor Arroyo, mayor of Herrera de Valdecañas, an agricultural engineer with a farm in the town, aware of all the global needs of this population.

125-meter steel towers and 78-meter blades

These are all examples of how small towns in Castilla y León see wind energy as a lifeline to face the future with optimism, taking advantage of a resource that they had little knowledge of until now.

Castilla y León is the autonomous community that produces the most electricity from wind energy; and Palencia, its third province in this ranking (44 parks), contributes 13% of this production.

In the Cerrato region alone there are eight wind farms (and almost a hundred windmills), seven of which affect the municipality of Hornillos.

The star wind turbines are the 10 wind turbines of the Celada Fusión wind farm, built by Acciona in 2022, true giants (4.8 MW of power, 13,600 MWh of production), capable of producing the equivalent of the electricity consumption of 40,000 families in total per year.

Each of these windmills is over 200 metres high (with 125-metre-high steel towers and 74-metre-long blades) with a huge and efficient sweeping area. However, although they are taller than the windmills built before, the difference is barely noticeable in this undulating landscape, full of hills but where sunflowers and cereals still take centre stage.

The debate on acceptance…

Acceptance of wind power here is almost unanimous.

The mayor is a belligerent defender of the construction of windmills against anyone who might claim that they will alter the landscape. “I travel to Madrid. Don’t the M-30, the M-40, the skyscrapers or the cement dams in the valleys have more impact? The people of the city want everything to be intact when they go to the village. But we also want to live. Electricity is necessary!”, says the mayor.

For most landowners, it is profitable to sacrifice small portions of land to accommodate the esplanades that will house the windmills, because they can continue to grow grain right next to the steel towers.

Whenever there are windmills, some are happy and others angry, they tell us; sometimes, even because many would like to welcome them into their fields.

“The value of the land they take from you is insignificant,” says the mayor of Hornillos as we discuss how, unlike other noisy machines we have seen, the Celada Fusión windmills are barely audible thanks to the vortices or fins that complete the blades.

“We removed the first mill projects because they were noisy and too close to the town; they were taken somewhere else,” recalls Álvaro Montoya, former mayor of Hornillos, now a councillor and an active agent of this implementation in his day.

In exchange, the rural population wants “the roads to be fixed or a mobile phone repeater”

The underlying debate on the implementation of wind power is to define how a more participatory and democratic energy model should be achieved in the current wind boom, which has littered Spain with windmills.

Although many energy companies have taken the plunge and are betting on clean and renewable energy, the energy model is sometimes criticised for being lacking in participatory and democratic principles. The 2021 Generalitat regulation, for example, requires wind power developers to offer affected municipalities an economic stake of at least 20% in the projects.

“In rural areas, people want their problems solved, their roads repaired or mobile phone repeaters installed,” says Juan de Lama, project manager at Acciona.

“Offering economic participation in projects (as required by Catalan law for example) seems to me to be a mantra. In villages, that doesn’t work. It is better for the company to allocate a percentage of the income generated by these facilities to the activities or services that the village decides and tailor it to its needs,” confirms Juan Virgilio Márquez, general director of the Wind Energy Business Association (AEE), who is in favour of achieving a “good scheme of coexistence” between wind farms and the villages that host them.

The illusion that is born from the wind

In any case, these towns in Palencia feel “reborn.” And that explains why plans are proliferating in Hornillos, such as the idea of ​​recovering the old gypsum mines for tourist visits (whose cold galleries are a climatic refuge in the first heat wave of July).

Or the desire to publicise the stay here in 1507 of Joanna I of Castile, her entourage and the remains of her husband Philip “The Handsome”.

Or the hiking and cycling routes created to showcase its windmills.

Breaths of illusion that are born from the force of the wind.

“There is not much migratory movement of birds”

At the Celada Fusión wind farm, it has not been considered necessary to hire bird watchers to prevent the risk of collisions with the blades, or to install modern systems with sensors and cameras that detect the presence and size of birds in flight and automatically stop the machines if they approach a certain distance. “There is not much migratory movement of birds, and that is why we think that this control is not necessary,” say Acciona technicians.
It is rare for a bird to appear at the foot of a windmill, confirms the Valdeolmillos councillor. However, this strict surveillance is carried out, for example, in the wind farms of Tarifa, where expert ornithological technicians have independent access to a device capable of disconnecting production (a windmill or an alignment) if they detect the approach of birds.

Sites with wind resources

The installation of wind turbines in Castilla y León is also sometimes favoured by the existence of land owned by the municipality itself, which paves the way. “This is an option that allows us to obtain agreements that are more beneficial for the municipalities and more economical for us,” admits Juan de Lama, project director at Acciona. And if not, there is the solution of renting private land. However, there are also cases in which residents reject the chosen location, “which forces us to look for other sites that generate less energy,” explains De Lama. But there is no policy on the part of energy companies focused on primarily seeking rural or unpopulated sites, as a strategy to prevent the rejection that sometimes occurs in populated areas. Above all, enclaves with wind resources and with good connections to the transport network where the electricity production must be dumped are chosen. “We are looking for places where there are more wind resources available, because we are talking about making very large investments and we are not interested in having sites where we cannot produce,” adds De Lama.

A problem that may be structural

The risk that demand will be lower than the high level of construction of new parks

Sometimes, windmills are stopped because there is no demand. There may also be cases in which an event occurs in the network and the wind turbines must be disconnected. Or there may be an excess of generation (congestion) that forces the same thing to happen: there is a lot of generation in the area and not enough demand. “But in general terms the network is sized so that the parks have access and can pour in the energy they are producing,” says Juan Virgilio Márquez.
However, “the challenge for Spain to continue advancing the implementation of renewable energy is that there must be parallel progress in the construction of new infrastructures and the capacity of the network with demand. If there is not sufficient demand, we will have renewable installations that will not generate energy at certain times of the day because there is no consumption,” warns Juan Virgilio Márquez.
This is the problem of “discharges”: energy that can be produced, but cannot be discharged because there is no one to buy it.
​Generally speaking, wind power has its production patterns quite closely aligned with those of consumption (it is generated mainly in the morning and evening). But photovoltaic energy, whose production occurs during the central hours of the day, is the one that “is suffering most from this problem now because it does not have the capacity to distribute it,” adds the general director of the AEE.
Wind power generates all day long; photovoltaic power generates when the sun is shining.