IN Brief:
- Six Spanish wind farms totalling 207MW will undergo a €330 million repowering programme.
- Naturgy plans to cut turbine numbers from 274 to 40 while increasing electricity production by 75%.
- The programme adds 26MW/94MWh of battery storage and has secured €68 million of public support.
Naturgy will invest €330 million to repower six Spanish wind farms, replacing 274 existing turbines with 40 newer machines while retaining the portfolio’s combined installed capacity of 207MW.
Naturgy will carry out the programme at Los Llanos in Málaga, Trucafort in Tarragona, Nerea in Zamora, Uzkita in Navarra, El Pilar in Zaragoza, and Los Pedreros in Albacete. Naturgy is the majority participant across the portfolio, with local partners including L’Energètica at Trucafort and EREN at Nerea.
The company expects the six projects to increase electricity production by 75% even though total installed capacity remains unchanged. The programme will also add battery storage totalling 26MW/94MWh, providing up to four hours of storage and adding controllable flexibility alongside the renewed generating assets.
The investment has secured €68 million through the second call of Spain’s Circular Repowering Programme, managed by IDAE and financed through the EU-backed recovery framework. The support is aimed at replacing ageing renewable assets while improving output and reducing environmental impacts from existing installations.
Reducing the turbine count from 274 to 40 changes the physical and electrical character of the sites. Each replacement machine will carry a much larger share of the installed capacity, while modern rotor, generator, converter, and control systems are expected to extract more energy from the available wind resource across a wider operating range.
Naturgy has not disclosed a single turbine model for all six sites, leaving final ratings, hub heights, rotor diameters, and layouts dependent on project-specific conditions. Each wind farm has its own wind regime, planning constraints, access routes, foundation requirements, and grid connection, limiting how far the repowering programme can be standardised.
The lower turbine count can simplify parts of the internal electrical network and reduce the number of foundations and maintenance points, but larger machines impose higher loads on foundations, cranes, transport routes, and erection areas. Existing substations and grid connections may be reusable, although higher annual energy throughput and new converter behaviour still require protection, power-quality, and connection studies.
The storage element adds another interface. A 26MW/94MWh battery fleet is modest beside 207MW of wind generation, but its duration allows part of the output to be shifted between hours rather than exported immediately. Depending on market and grid arrangements, the batteries can also support reserve services and reduce curtailment during periods when renewable output exceeds local or system demand.
Spain’s growing renewable share is making that flexibility more valuable. Wind and solar output increasingly determine wholesale-market conditions during large parts of the day, while the network still has to balance production and consumption continuously. Storage can separate the timing of generation from the timing of export, giving repowered sites more options than a generation-only configuration.
The programme follows a broader move towards pairing upgraded renewable assets with flexibility rather than treating batteries as separate developments. ACCIONA Energía has been adding two-hour storage to existing Spanish renewable sites, while Naturgy’s programme combines storage with a multi-region renewal of an ageing wind fleet.
Repowering offers a different route to growth from greenfield development. Established wind sites already have measured resource, operating history, access arrangements, and grid infrastructure. Replacing older machines can therefore increase annual output without increasing the headline installed capacity or expanding the number of turbine positions.
Construction is more complicated than a simple equipment swap. Existing turbines must be taken out of service and dismantled, components and materials removed or recovered, access roads and foundations assessed, and new machines erected while grid and battery work proceeds across the same programme. Outage planning becomes part of the commercial schedule because generation is lost while sections of a site are unavailable.
The claimed 75% production increase will ultimately depend on wind conditions, turbine availability, curtailment, and the performance of the upgraded electrical systems. It nevertheless demonstrates the scale of additional energy that developers expect to recover from sites first designed around much smaller machines.
Naturgy also expects the reduction from 274 turbines to 40 to lower the visual and physical intensity of the portfolio. Modern turbines are considerably larger structures, so the change does not remove environmental or planning effects, but it cuts the number of individual machines, foundations, and routine maintenance points by more than 80%.
The six projects bring asset renewal, storage integration, and reuse of established grid connections into the same investment programme. The installed wind capacity remains 207MW; the commercial and system value will come from producing more energy from those megawatts and having greater control over when part of that electricity reaches the network.
