BARCELONA, Spain, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Spain's main electric utility company, Iberdrola, plans to build the largest hydroelectric power plant in Western Europe.
Work will begin next year on Conso II, a pumped storage power plant, or gigabattery, in the Sil basin in Ourense in the country's northwestern region of Galicia, said the company, which has recently begun releasing details of the project.
"This type of project makes a lot of sense as a transition to achieving other alternatives that we don't have yet, it's worth doing, in fact, many countries base their electricity grid on hydraulic energy and hydraulic storage," Cristian Fabrega, Coordinator of the Master in Renewable Energies and Energy Sustainability at the University of Barcelona, told Xinhua on Wednesday.
The plant will link the high-altitude Cenza reservoir with the lower-altitude Bao reservoir, taking advantage of the difference in altitude of 690 meters to generate and store energy.
The construction project will take six years to complete, says Iberdrola, which is investing 1.5 billion euros (1.58 billion U.S. dollars) in the new infrastructure to produce 100 percent renewable energy.
According to Fabrega, such investments are more common as increasingly more energy companies are developing large renewable energy projects "because they've seen they have to diversify their business and cannot simply rely on oil or gas".
The Conso II plant will use surplus solar energy produced during the day to pump water between the reservoirs, where it will be stored until needed to generate power by passing it through turbines.
"This will be an infrastructure that will not require new reservoirs or deposits, as it will use existing ones," the company said in a statement, adding that its functioning "will be a 100 percent clean process".
As for the plant's capacity, it will produce 4,000 GWh per year, estimates Iberdrola, which is almost double that produced by any nuclear power station in Spain.
The company also says the new plant is designed to provide a reserve of 58 million kWh of storable energy, the equivalent to the average daily consumption of 10 million users.
