Spain: These are the new measures to strengthen the electricity industry included in the Royal Decree-law 7/2025

Royal Decree-law 7/2025 of June 24, 2025 approving urgent measures to strengthen the electricity system (Royal Decree-law 7/2025), published in the Spanish Official National Gazette on June 25, 2025, was approved in the wake of the Report prepared by the Committee to analyze the circumstances surrounding the electricity crisis on April 28, 2025 and includes new measures aimed at building up the resilience of the electricity system. Some of these measures are especially important for processes for renewable energy plants and, in particular, for the development of storage plants and the repowering of plants in operation. The following relevant elements can be highlighted:

• Instructions to the Spanish Markets and Competition Commission and the system operator in relation to the April 28 crisis

  Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 gives specific instructions to the Spanish Markets and Competition Commission regarding the preparation of a report to monitor compliance with voltage control obligations by those parties required to comply, and the completion of a special plan for inspecting the restoration capacities of the agents involved.

  It also orders the system operator to carry out a review and analysis process and to prepare legislative amendment proposals in relation to the electricity crisis on April 28, 2025.

• Measures affecting developers in relation to the sharing of power transfer infrastructure

  Articles 4 and 5 of Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 introduce measures aimed at improving the governance of the evacuation infrastructure shared by various owners of production and storage plants transferring power to the grid.

  The amendment of article 21 of Law 24/2013, of December 26, 2013 on the electricity industry (Law 24/2013) sets out the criterion of the joint and several nature of any liability assumed in relation to events related to that evacuation infrastructure by those owners with respect to the electricity system. It also lays down an obligation to execute private agreements setting out the distribution of liability among owners of the generation or storage plants making use of the shared infrastructure. These agreements cannot stipulate a full exemption for any of the owners from any liability. In the absence of such an agreement, it will be assumed that the liability is distributed among the facilities in proportion to their access capacity.

  In addition, any projects already holding a prior administrative authorization have a period of one year in which to submit the agreement described in the previous paragraph to the authorities.

• Measures to strengthen voltage monitoring

  Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 amends certain articles of Royal Decree 413/2014 of June 6, 2013 on the activity of producing electricity using renewable sources, cogeneration and waste (Royal Decree 413/2014) for the purpose of adapting and harmonizing the penalties for any failure to monitor voltage, in line with the provisions of the recent resolution dated June 12, 2025, by the Spanish Markets and Competition Commission, amending operating procedures 3.1, 3.6, 7.4, 9.1 and 14.4 for the creation of a voltage monitoring service in the Spanish peninsular electricity system. This resolution was published in the Spanish Official State Gazette on June 26, which marks its entry into force.

• Measures to encourage storage

  Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 includes numerous measures aimed at encouraging the development of storage plants, which are considered to be facilities needed to provide flexibility and contribute to the safety of the electricity system. The most notable of these measures are:

  • Article 54.1 of Law 24/2013 is amended to recognize the public utility of storage plants supplying energy, at the same level as plants generating renewable energy.
  • Moreover, it includes an exemption from a prior administrative authorization and administrative authorization for construction for storage plants of up to 500 kW of installed capacity.
  • Administrative simplification measures are included for hybrid storage plants which are authorized by the central government, such as:
    
    1. A declaration of urgency for authorization procedures which will not require an ordinary environmental impact statement or any declaration of public interest.
    2. Exemption from the simplified environmental impact assessment procedure where the hybrid electrochemical storage falls within the polygonal of the original generation project and this original project obtained a favorable environmental impact statement.
    3. A reduction by half of the processing periods under Royal Decree 1955/2000 of December 1, 2000 on the activities of transmission, distribution, marketing, supply and authorization procedures for electricity plants (Royal Decree 1955/2000).
    4. The joint processing of and decision on the prior administrative authorization and administrative authorization for construction.
  • It lays down the obligation to approve implementing regulations amending the definition of installed capacity of generating and/or storage plants within 12 months. Until this approval takes place, a temporary definition of installed capacity is included for storage plants sharing the same inverter or transformer with generation plants. This definition will even apply in procedures that commenced prior to the entry into force of Royal Decree-Law 7/2025, although, for the purpose of avoiding any damage that might be caused by the recommencement of a new procedure due to a change of competent authority, the plants will be entitled to continue to be processed by the authority under which the procedure commenced, or to withdraw from it in order to start the procedure under another authority. In any case, this will not imply enforcement of the access and connection guarantees, although this does not preclude the possible expiration of access and connection permits.
  • Annex XV to Royal Decree 413/2014 is amended to adjust the priority for transferring power, which prevents the penalization of renewable energy plants combined with storage plants, provided that the storage plants meet certain capacity requirements.
  • Law 24/2013 is amended to establish that storage plants’ access and connection permits will always be flexible from a demand perspective.
  • A new paragraph is added to article 39.3 of Law 24/2013, excluding hybrid or stand-alone storage plants from the definition of consumer contained in that subarticle and, therefore, from the treatment as distribution grid of those plants intended for more than one storage system.

• Measures to increase the flexibility of the system

  Among other measures, Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 sets out the basic governing principles associated with the response to demand and provides more detailed rules on the role of independent aggregator.

• Flexible transportation grid planning

  Chapter III of Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 includes measures to add flexibility to grid planning of electric energy, including a reduction to the planning review period of the transmission grid, from six to three years.

  Furthermore, an obligation is laid down to approve any amendments to specific elements of the transmission grid development plans every two years where there are appropriately substantiated technical grounds, and position planning is introduced for feeding demand in power grid nodes where certain circumstances occur.

• Expiry of demand connection and access permits

  Article 21 and transitional provision one of Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 introduce rules on demand access and connection permits. Notably the amendments enacted under article 26 of Royal Decree 1183/2020, of December 29, 2020, on access and connection to electricity transmission and distribution grids (Royal Decree 1183/2020) relating to:

  • The extending of cases determining automatic expiry of these permits to include all those demand plants whose connection point has a voltage of 1 kV or higher (previously, this only affected connection points of over 36 kV).
  • The conditions for keeping access and connection permits in force, whereby it is enough to execute, within a period of five years, an access agreement for a contracted capacity in any of the tariff periods of at least 50% of the granted access capacity (under the previous rules, this threshold applied in respect of the capacity contracted in the P1 period).
  • In relation to access permits for storage plants supplying energy to the grid, the connection of the expiry of the access and connection permit for demand as a facility consuming energy from the grid to the expiry of the access and connection permit related to the classification as a generating facility.

• Measures aimed at increasing industrial electricity demand

  Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 reinstates the support mechanism for guaranteeing the competitiveness of electricity-intensive industry originally introduced by Royal Decree-Law 6/2022 of March 29, 2022, which was in force until January 22, 2025.

• Measures relating to self-supply

  Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 includes certain amendments of Royal Decree 244/2019 of April 5, 2019 on the administrative, technical and economic conditions for the self-supply of electricity, such as the inclusion of new types of self-supply and the increase in the distance of between the generation facility and the associated self-supply consumer, which means that the production plant and the plant of the associated consumer may be located at a distance of less than 5,000 meters (previously, 2,000 meters), provided that these are photovoltaic plants with a capacity of up to 5 MW.

• Measures for encouraging the repowering of plants in operation

  Measures aligned with the EU’s repower legislation are included:

  • Firstly, a definition of “repowering” is introduced in central government legislation, similar to that established under Directive (EU) 2018/2001, dated December 11, 2018, which is seen as a “renewal” or renovation of the plants aimed at replacing machines, improving efficiency, increasing the energy produced and/or increasing the installed capacity.
  • For the purpose of making the processes for these renewals of existing plants easier, the periods for processing any repowering are reduced by half in the cases where the increase of the installed capacity is below 25% of the original capacity.
  • Similarly, it is established that the ordinary or simplified environmental impact assessment should only be referred to the possible additional differentiating impact involved in the amendment or extension of the original project, pursuant to Directive (EU) 2023/2413, dated October 18, 2023. This provision will also apply to the hybridizations and storage plants.

• Provisional testing permit

  Through the amendment of Article 53.1 of Law 24/2013, the operating authorization procedure is divided into two stages: a provisional operating permit for testing and the definitive operating permit. The provisional operating permit for testing is set up as a mandatory procedure for production and storage plants, and as an optional procedure for all other plants.

  In line with this, for plants that are processed pursuant to Royal Decree 1955/2000, amendments are made to specify the documents required for obtaining those permits and their processing periods. In addition, measures are included for aligning the obtaining of the administrative operating permits for plants that share power transfer infrastructure with other developers where these facilities are processed in different administrative files, allowing the issuing of partial operating permits for testing of the shared evacuation infrastructure.

• Amendment of the administrative milestones of Royal Decree-Law 23/2020 and exceptional extension of such milestones

  Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 includes significant amendments regarding the rules on the fifth administrative milestone introduced by Royal Decree-Law 23/2020 of June 23, 2020 approving measures relating to energy and in other areas for reactivating the economy (Royal Decree-Law 23/2020), in order to maintain access and connection to the transmission and distribution grids for renewable energy plants. These notably include the following:

  • It will be understood that, for the purposes of evidencing the fulfillment of the fifth milestone, a provisional operating permit for testing must be obtained (previously, the definitive operating permit was required).
  • The maximum period for evidencing the fifth milestone for those plants that had to comply with this milestone by June 25, 2025 is automatically extended until September 25, 2025.
  • The period for evidencing the fifth milestone for pump plants has been extended to 12 years (previously, the maximum processing period was nine years).

  • Exceptionally, those plants holding access and connection permits are allowed to request an extension of the period for evidencing achievement of the fifth milestone, always considering that the total period for having the provisional operating permit for testing cannot go above eight years.

    The regulations approved in this respect are similar to those established under Royal Decree-Law 8/2023, dated December 27, 2023 (which we analyzed here), although two important new elements are included:

    1. The extension of the fifth milestone may be requested for all plants that obtained access and connection permits after December 27, 2013 (i.e. it is not restricted to those with permits granted after December 31, 2017).
    2. Any plants that have already obtained an extension of the fifth milestone based on the aforementioned Royal Decree-Law 8/2023 are allowed to ask for the date chosen at the time to be brought forward or delayed, provided that it is within the permitted eight-year limit.

In order to obtain a change to the deadline for the fifth milestone, developers must request a change to the six-month operating start-up period within two months running from (i) the entry into force of Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 or (ii) the obtaining of the construction administrative permit, if this is later. A decision will be delivered within four months and the absence of any decision will mean the request has been dismissed.

• Suspension of the milestones of Royal Decree-Law 23/2020 for those plants affected by provisional administrative or judicial measures

  Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 amends article 1 of Royal Decree-Law 23/2020 to provide that the declaration of the provisional suspension of the validity of administrative permits decided following an administrative appeal or application for judicial review will also imply suspension of the calculation of the periods for complying with the milestones of Royal Decree-Law 23/2020 until the provisional measure is lifted.

  The suspension must be reported by the developer to the grid manager and the administrative body responsible for granting the administrative permits. Furthermore, once notification of the lifting of the provisional suspension has been made, the developer must communicate this within three months. Any failure to make that communication will imply automatic expiry of the access and connection permits.

• New execution periods for distribution infrastructure needed for new supplies

  To cut the periods for developing energy supply infrastructure, Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 stipulates the time periods to be met by distribution companies for bringing into operation the grid extensions required to cope with these new supplies. In relation to this, separate periods are established for extension of the infrastructure carried out by the distribution company and for extensions carried out by an installation company on behalf of the client.

• Amendments relating to the guarantees to be provided for access and connection

  Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 includes certain amendments of Royal Decree 1183/2020 relating to the financial guarantees that must be provided for the access and connection procedures. Specifically:

  • For electricity generation plants, it is generally established that any request for a ruling on the adequate provision of the guarantee must include the node or line and voltage of the power grid or distribution network to which access and connection is to be made.

  • For demand facilities (and, explicitly, those storage plants absorbing energy from the grid), certain amendments are included in relation to the content of the guarantee and, in particular, it specifies the administrative body to which the security must be provided in the case of storage plants absorbing energy from the grid, and these must be authorized by the national authorities.

    In addition, new criteria are added for determining when a demand or storage plant can be considered to be the same one, and it adds to the location criterion (i) the change of the business classification code (Clasificación Nacional de Actividades Económicas) (CNAE) associated with the facility at the second level of the code and (ii) a reduction by more than 50% of the demand access capacity originally requested or granted.

    Finally, it is established that the cancellation of the financial guarantee in the case of storage plants absorbing energy from the grid must be in line with article 23 of Royal Decree 1183/2020.

As specified in final provision seven, Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 will enter into force on the same day it is published in the Spanish Official National Gazette, i.e. on June 25, 2025.

As an exception, the provisions contained in article 32 regarding the milestones of Royal Decree-Law 23/2020 are considered to have been in force since June 24, 2025 and specific periods are included for certain amendments enacted in relation to Royal Decree 413/2014.

It needs to be noted, however, that this legislation must be submitted for a debate and vote by the Spanish Congress within 30 days, and the Spanish Congress has to declare whether it has been approved or revoked. During this period, it may be processed as a draft bill processed in an urgent procedure.