Solidarity with Europe and maximum energy savings, in a "critical" situation. The Contingency and Savings Plan approved yesterday by the Council of Ministers is based on these bases, which represents the first package of urgent measures to fulfill the commitment made with Brussels to reduce energy consumption by 7%, which will last until November 2023.
The plan involves setting thermostats in buildings serving the public to a maximum of 19 degrees for heating in winter and a minimum of 27 degrees for air conditioning in summer.
“The measure is already applied in the central administration and is now extended to the buildings of the public administration of the autonomous communities and municipalities, as well as to private administrative buildings such as shops, department stores, hotels, cultural buildings, train stations, bus and airports”, the Minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, explained yesterday.
In addition, these buildings will be required to ensure the closing of doors to maintain the temperature, as well as turning off the lights in all shop windows and internal lighting during the time they are not in use after 10 p.m. In order to facilitate this adaptation, the Government has established a margin of between one week and 10 days to apply these measures from their publication this Tuesday in the Official State Gazette and they will be in force until November 2023, in addition public sector contracting is accelerated to facilitate the energy improvements that are necessary.
The measures approved yesterday are completed with the requirement to indicate the measures adopted on posters, as well as easily visible thermometers to verify compliance with them. In any case, the third vice-president has recognized that the text accepts “flexibility measures, duly justified, to guarantee adequate working conditions in the workplace”.
The Government has also asked to promote, in line with what the central administration is also doing, teleworking. "We were able to do it in a pandemic and since then we have learned a lot," Ribera assured after the Council of Ministers, although he did not detail how the Government plans to apply this impulse.
Together with these saving measures, the Government wants to promote the transition to clean energies that reduce dependence on gas. To do this, it will streamline the processing of networks and infrastructures and promote storage and self-consumption. Similarly, it also promotes the substitution of natural gas for renewable gases by facilitating its injection into the gas pipeline network.
Additionally, measures are activated to structurally reduce foreign energy dependency, with 350 million euros in aid to increase the efficiency of different sectors of the economy and promote storage in renewable energy facilities.
It also calls for a new auction of renewables, with 3,300 MW for wind and photovoltaic plants, and launches a prior public consultation to update the National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan 2021-2030 (PNIEC), so that it incorporates the measures adopted in the plan national and at the European level. Vice President Teresa Ribera described the approved package as "assumable and bearable measures, despite the fact that they entail efforts."
In turn, Reclamó demanded that public administrations be "an example" to assume the efforts that are being demanded from the private sector. “It would be absolutely reckless for no person in charge of a public administration to be willing to say that they are not committed to these measures,” she assured.
These are only the first energy measures, which will be completed next September when the contingency plan that must be sent to Brussels will be completed, as Teresa Ribera explained yesterday.
The approved measures are aimed at rapidly reducing consumption – changes in behavior can reduce the demand for gas and oil by 5% in the short term – and at promoting the electrification of the economy and the reduction of the consumption of gas of fossil origin.
