Cryptowatts

From our perspective of environmental consultants, specialized in covering new developments in renewable energy, it is increasingly evident how volatile a significant percentage of projects become, which has led us to coin the term of cryptowatts.

It is commonly accepted that in all markets with fluctuations and peaks of high demand (such as traditional real estate and now technology or energy) there are speculative movements or opportunistic supply (lacking sufficient technical rigor) that distort prices, product credibility and the normal growth of the sector, regardless of the natural adjustments entailed by the law of supply and demand.

The background of the current wave, from 2016 to date, is known: the wave of 2007-2010, especially with photovoltaic solar energy (not forgetting the ill-fated solar thermal energy or the fleeting biodiesel), or the previous wave of 1996-2002 with wind energy. Regardless of explosive accelerating milestones such as the war in Ukraine, we have detected a high volume of “smoke” projects: technically incoherent and dubious environmental compatibility, which have only sought to generate a possibility of speculative sale of unrealizable watts.

These projects, designed for sale at an early stage of development (sometimes even before the start of the procedure of environmental assessment), in addition to the particular damage they have caused to the purchaser of the same, they have distorted strategic planning in renewable energy, high prices of basic inputs (such as land leases) or, in short, creating a bubble in which some unwary people, including investment funds, have fallen into the trap of acquiring these toxic assets that turn them into high-risk products such as cryptocurrency.

Another novel pernicious effect generated by these cryptowatts is distrust and social rejection of renewable projects. Not only on the part of environmental associations, whose necessary function is to objectively criticize, as a reinforcement to the work of Public Administrations and consultants, any project that does not have the necessary guarantees of environmental compatibility, but that extends to society in general, and especially to that linked to the rural world.

Regardless of the positive effects on local development, citizens are baffled. She feels threatened by a volume of projects that sometimes will never come to fruition, but which increases the level of alarm and, by extension, unnecessary or above normal popular opposition, since we do not remove an ounce of need from the position of spontaneous collectives and social movements regarding the rejection of certain feasible or “real” projects.

Regardless of the liberal theses of self-regulation of the market with its own mechanisms, the efforts of the substantive and environmental administrative body are to be appreciated (despite the controversial RDL 6/22 ), for more and more protection in proposals for New contests the development of feasible, real, efficient, coherent and orderly projects; without detracting from the need for improvement in terms of strategic planning, which would serve to prevent the emergence of sterile projects as a source of crypowatios.

On the part of the consultants, we are left with the challenge of knowing how to reformulate and adapt, and not to make up, this type of project, as well as advise in advance to unwary developers who, out of ignorance, launch this type of project. Additionally, and ultimately, we try to know how to decline those toxic developments that are clearly launched with a clear and unique speculative intention, ignoring the principles of sustainability. At Ideas MedioAmbiental we continue to strive to be co-responsible, not neglecting our part of self-criticism because we are aware, due to the large number of projects in which we have participated, that in all this time we have scored a goal and that is why we continue to work on our motto of “we don't buy problems, we sell solutions”.