Storage recognized as ‘strategic’ in Spain’s new regulation, as AEPIBAL comments

AEPIBAL has shared its views with pv magazine Spain following the publication of Royal Decree-Law (RDL) 7/2025, a package of urgent measures intended to reinforce Spain’s electricity system:

From AEPIBAL, we want to express our support for the RDL approved on June 25, which represents a great step forward for storage as it unlocks some of the bottlenecks that until now held back a solid and legally secure deployment of storage in our country.

The key elements on which AEPIBAL has worked for years with the Ministry and which are now finally reflected in the new regulations are the following:

• The Declaration of Public Utility (DUP) has been established for evacuation lines, which had been a significant bottleneck for project development.
• For hybridisations with batteries, as long as they are located within the project boundary (the polygonal), the permitting timeline will be shortened and, crucially, these projects will be exempt from environmental impact assessments.
• Installed capacity is now defined as the maximum output of the inverter or inverters. This changes the criteria for assigning the competent authority (Ministry for projects >50 MW, regional governments for <50 MW), as capacities are no longer added together in hybrid projects.
• In a critical area where the Ministry has asserted its position over the CNMC, the discrimination previously faced by hybridised installations in the order of technical restrictions has been eliminated. All renewable installations, whether or not hybridised with storage, will now be the last to be curtailed in the event of grid congestion.
• Another major development is that storage installations will receive flexible access permits for demand and will not be treated as consumers. At the same time, inconsistencies in the economic guarantees for access and connection have been resolved: these will now be handled by the authority managing the file, and their cancellation will depend on the cancellation of the generation guarantee—not on a supply contract.
• Finally, in relation to behind-the-meter (BTM) storage, the role of the independent aggregator has been regulated, an issue that deserves further specific discussion and analysis.

It is important to clarify that this RDL has an initial validity period of 30 days, during which it must be ratified by the Congress of Deputies in order to be permanently incorporated into the legal framework. If not ratified, all measures in the RDL will expire and the previous regulatory regime will return.

That is why, from AEPIBAL, we will do our best to convince the various parliamentary groups of the importance of consolidating this regulatory progress, not from a place of dogma, but with a pragmatic approach to strengthening the new energy architecture that so many of us have been working toward for years, and into which so much investment, so many projects, and so many expectations have been placed.