Spain needs electric cars, links for wind boom

Spain needs electric cars and a lot more power links with France to better deal with big swings in wind output and spread the benefits of its clean energy boom across Europe, the head of Spanish grid operator Red Electrica said on Monday.

Spain's 18,700 megawatts of installed wind turbines have supplied more than half of its demand at times this winter, forcing Red Electrica to stop some turbines to keep system stability because a dearth of grid connections prevented the green energy from reaching the rest of Europe.

"The bottleneck is the French network but it's really about being connected to the whole European system," Red Electrica president Luis Atienza told Reuters in an interview.

For further information: Reuters