Spain has quietly done something more consequential than any auction: it abolished the binary grid access model.
For two decades, demand-side access was firm or refused. Once the queue saturated, refusal became the default — and the permit itself became the traded asset. The numbers show how artificial that scarcity was: more than 22 GW of BESS applications sit in the Spanish queue while peak demand runs 12% below the 2007 record. The grid ran out of contractual access rights, not physical space.
That model is now gone. The CNMC’s final resolution, published in the BOE on 11 August and in force 1 September, defines four flexible access modalities:
0⃣ Type 0 (consumption within authorised hourly patterns),
1⃣ Type 1 (firm in normal conditions, remote disconnection under N-1),
2⃣ Type 2 (active DSO management above 1 MW) and
3⃣ Type 3 (transmission-connected, curtailable on TSO instruction).
The detail that matters most for our sector: storage demand access – batteries and pumping – is now analysed as flexible by design. And the clock is running: Types 0, 1 and 3 open for application for just six months.
Layer on REE’s monthly capacity maps – available, occupied and permissible capacity at every node, now extended to flexible access – and the information asymmetry that sustained queue speculation is gone.
My read as a developer on both sides of the border: flexible access separates serious projects from queue trading, because accepting curtailment requires a real revenue model – the €900m/yr capacity market floor, ancillary services, arbitrage – not just a permit to flip. Two permits of identical MW can now differ several times in value, and the inputs to price that difference are public.
Portugal should study this closely. Our 14 September storage auction already allocates capacity at named nodes – node-targeted access is becoming the Iberian norm.
Grid access permits were the scarce asset of the last cycle. In the next one, the scarce asset is knowing what your access is actually worth.