Tarragona
Barcelona
Tarragona
Barcelona
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The Terrassa City Council has submitted allegations to the Generalitat de Catalunya’s plan for the implementation of wind and photovoltaic energy with the aim of protecting the Green Belt and limiting the occupation of non-developable land in the municipality. The local government rejects that the planned land reserve opens the door to a disorderly implementation of panels by private initiative.
The tension arises from the difference between the power demanded of the city and the surface area that the document leaves available. While the plan sets 233.9 photovoltaic megawatts for Terrassa, a figure that would require 26 hectares of non-developable land, it also identifies 1,066 potential hectares, an area about 40 times larger that would be equivalent to 25% of the Green Belt.
Patricia Reche, deputy mayor, explained in the Ecological Transition information commission that this margin is unmanageable due to the territorial impact and the lack of municipal tools to curb a massive influx of projects.
Technical services warned that the planned land pool could generate speculative pressure. They also warned that, if all licenses arrived at the same time, the city council would not have the capacity to prevent it.
Therefore, the council proposes to reduce the potential area to 319.73 hectares.
The municipal proposal thus reduces the impact to 7.27% of non-developable land and advocates for a sequential deployment. The criterion is to first exhaust already artificialized spaces before extending the facilities to other areas of the municipal term.
In parallel, the city maintains that it has sufficient roof space to cover a good part of the objectives. Terrassa can generate between 418 and 780 megawatts on rooftops, above the 202 megawatts required in the urban environment, and also wants to link asbestos removal to photovoltaic deployment.
Terrassa is already the second Catalan city in photovoltaic self-consumption.
In the municipality, there are 45,500 installed modules that avoid 6,900 tons of CO2 per year, in addition to 29 municipal buildings that already generate energy. This previous progress reinforces the city council’s position in favor of prioritizing roofs and transformed surfaces over new occupations in the Green Belt.
Within that debate, Pep Forn, councilor of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, demanded that private developers be required to install mandatory solar pergolas in new parking lots of large commercial areas and gas stations. In the same session, the local government ruled out considering swimming pools as climate shelters due to high temperatures, citing organizational problems with the concessionaire company and the risk of sunstroke, an issue linked to climate shelters in Terrassa.
In addition to the Terrassa case, the Department of Territory, Housing, and Ecological Transition has received 12,143 allegations to the plan throughout Catalonia. The Catalan Institute of Energy has already begun analyzing them to incorporate those that are technically viable, while councilor Sílvia Paneque defended that this process must adjust technical results to the social reality of each municipality.
On September 15, the subject of Urban Water Engineering and Management begins, promoted by the business chair of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia TAIGUA, after the municipal company has reinforced its energy strategy with actions such as water tanks with energy surplus.
The city council also maintains its commitment to review the data on suspended particles from the Rambleta station and is preparing a report on the victim census for the 64th anniversary of the 1962 Flood.
Journalist
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