The same week, two news stories that should be read together.

On 23 June, Mario Ruiz-Tagle, CEO of Iberdrola España, told El Mundo he found it “reasonable” to open Red Eléctrica's business to competition through auctions, following the models of Brazil, Chile and the United Kingdom. His diagnosis: there are around 100,000 MW of industrial demand waiting for a connection they can't get because the transmission grid provides no access.

Three days later, Manuel Fernández Ordóñez published in Libre Mercado an article titled “Red Eléctrica, or how to impoverish a country in slow motion”. The figures he cited were devastating: of the 2025-2030 electricity plan, with 659 investment items, 402 (60%) come from earlier plans that were never carried out. More than half of the actions record delays averaging seven years. Seven. Some have been dragging on since 2008.

A note of caution: Iberdrola is not a neutral observer in this debate. It is a direct competitor and would benefit from opening transmission to auctions, because it would bid for those lines. But that is precisely why its diagnosis is revealing: even a player that could capitalise on the status quo admits the bottleneck exists. When the CEO of the country's largest utility and an independent analyst agree that the grid model isn't working, something is going on.

The question is: what alternative models exist? How do other countries do it? And, above all, what should Spain learn from them?

The Spanish problem: a monopoly without consequences

The Spanish system has a peculiarity: Red Eléctrica is at once the sole owner of the high-voltage lines and the operator that decides how energy flows and who gets connected. It is judge and party. And as PwC has pointed out in its analysis, when there is neither competition nor consequences for failure, inertia always beats execution.

The result: Spain is, together with Portugal, the country with the most privatised electricity market in the OECD. Zero public ownership at state level. Meanwhile:

It's not that the public model is always better. It's that Spain has taken privatisation to the extreme without creating the regulatory checks that other countries do have.

The German model: four transmission operators and nine hundred municipalities

Germany is the most interesting case for comparison.

In transmission (high voltage), Germany has no monopoly like REE. It has four operators: 50Hertz, Amprion, TenneT and TransnetBW. All regulated by the Bundesnetzagentur, but competing on efficiency and subject to independent oversight.

In distribution, the model is even more revealing. Germany has around 900 Stadtwerke: municipal energy companies, many of them public, that manage the local grid. Two out of three German households get their electricity from these municipal companies. The best-known example is Munich's Stadtwerke, which have supplied 100% renewable electricity to the whole city since 2016.

This model did not come about by chance. Since 2005, Germany has seen a wave of energy remunicipalisation: dozens of cities took back the management of their grids when private concessions expired.

That said, the German model isn't perfect either. A BNE analysis published in June 2026 reveals that the 18 largest distribution grid operators earned a market-share-weighted average return of 30.1% in 2024, up from 16.6% the year before. Companies like EWE Netz (61%), Westnetz (45%) or Bayernwerk (38%) have margins far above any comparable industry.

Ownership matters, but incentives matter more. Germany has more players, more competition and more municipal reach, but if regulation rewards inefficiency, the result can be just as frustrating.

Catalonia and AMEP: municipalism as an answer

While the national debate focuses on whether to open transmission to private auctions or keep REE's monopoly, in Catalonia a movement has emerged that proposes a third way: that the distribution grid be public and managed by municipalities.

The Association of Municipalities and Entities for Public Energy (AMEP) already brings together 124 entities: 119 town councils, two provincial councils (Barcelona and Girona), one comarcal council and two municipal entities.

On 20 May, six political parties (Sumar, ERC, Bildu, BNG, Podemos and Més-Compromís) registered in Congress a Non-Legislative Motion driven by AMEP calling for public ownership of the distribution grid. The most interesting element: energy communities could manage distribution grids within their area of operation.

Six years on the front line

I write this from experience. When we started, in early 2020, at Sapiens Energía, with the first collective self-consumption projects for energy communities, every project was a battle. Six years on it's only a little easier, and still depends on the lottery: which distributor you get and which manager you find. But those are the minor problems.

The real problem is scale. And scale isn't won with 100 kW installations. Now, at last, Royal Decree-Law 7/2026 allows it: up to 5 MW and radii of up to 5 kilometres between generation and consumption. On paper, it's the framework we'd been asking for for years.

And what do we run into the next day? That there's no capacity on the grid. We have the rule that lets us grow and we don't have the cable to do it.

So, what do we do? This deserves an answer: a fair and proportionate solution that prioritises the projects with the greatest social impact. Because connecting a data centre is not the same as connecting an energy community that lowers the bill for families who can't make ends meet. The grid's scarce capacity should be allocated with an eye also to who benefits, not just who arrives first.

Strategic analysis: what does this mean for the sector?

The transmission grid is the bottleneck of the country's electrification. It doesn't matter that we have record renewable generation if we can't connect industrial demand, the new data centres, electric mobility or energy communities.

The debate shouldn't be public versus private. That false dilemma has kept us paralysed for too long. The real debate is monopoly versus competition, centralisation versus decentralisation, opacity versus transparency.

A system with multiple transmission operators, with municipal distribution companies, with energy communities that can manage their grids and with regulation that penalises non-compliance —as exists in Germany, as is being debated in Catalonia— would probably work better than the current one.

But that requires something in short supply in Spanish energy policy: the will for institutional reform, not just technical patches.

As Fernández Ordóñez says, the problem isn't technical. It's about the model.

Sources

About the author

Juan Sacri is an engineer, cooperativist and co-founder of Sapiens Energía —a non-profit cooperative that has supported more than 90 energy communities across Spain— and of AVACE, the Valencian Association of Energy Communities.

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