Sun, sea, sand and shared energy: Spanish sunshine powers Tenerife community

As the largest of the Canary Islands, Tenerife is a favourite destination for holiday makers, a whopping 5.6m tourists flocked there last year, but did you know we’ve been working with the island to form an innovative energy community using local renewable energy sources, creating a more sustainable energy future for Costa Adeje.

Working with Adeje, a popular tourist town in southwest Tenerife, home to Siam water park, we’ve formed a self-consumption energy community called ‘Adeje Verde’ where the aim is to supply the community with 100% energy from local renewable sources.

It’s the first project of its kind in Europe and one of the largest solar circles in Spain, which connects 200 customers within a 500-metre radius, allowing them to produce, share and collectively use renewable electricity. This means where residents produce more solar power than they need, the excess power is passed onto neighbours at a reduced rate, rather the being fed back into the grid, allowing community members to continually benefit from each other.

The potential for solar circles is incredible. If just 20% of people across Europe were part of a local energy community like that in Adeje Verde, we could save over six million tons of CO₂ emissions each year.

Many European islands have excellent conditions for producing energy from the sun, wind, and waves, but often lack the infrastructure to achieve this.  While energy storage and lower grid capacities present challenges the Canary Island government is working towards transitioning all islands to 100% renewable sources by 2040. The new Adeje Verde energy community is a significant step in the transformation journey. It will act as a pilot, demonstrating how the rest of the region can produce and use sustainable energy.

So next time you take a vacation, consider that the holiday sunshine could be providing you with all the electricity you need!