How to prevent the electrical grid from slowing down the economy and housing
BarcelonaThese days, the BBVA Research report has put figures to a problem that developers and distributors have been warning about for some time: more than 80,000 homes planned in Spain depend on new electrical infrastructure to be able to go ahead. In Madrid, the gap between residential needs and available capacity is especially visible. Catalonia does not appear there with an equivalent figure, and this is indicative: it cannot be said that it has the same problem as Madrid today, but it is not entirely protected from it either.
The report places Barcelona and Lleida among the territories where the availability of electrical capacity can condition residential development. Catalonia starts, comparatively, from a better position than other territories thanks to a network built over decades around an urban and industrial economy.
Aggregate electricity demand has had no significant structural growth for 25 years. And yet, it is becoming increasingly difficult to connect a new home, an industrial estate, or a data center. The demand for access requests has multiplied tenfold in a few years, because access to the grid has become a scarce commodity, and reserving it has value even if the project that requested it never gets built. The grid has not been saturated by actual consumption; it has been saturated by the hoarding of a resource that has become valuable.
Although this has been attempted to be regulated through additional guarantees, grid security conditions, and requirements to access it, in practice it has added administrative filters and has increased the grid bottleneck even further. The recently introduced capacity reservation deposits—which mean that maintaining capacity without using it now has a real cost—are in the right direction and will likely free up some of this withheld capacity, but they are arriving late.
BBVA Research provides a figure that is hard to ignore: 88% of Spanish distribution nodes have less than 1 MW of available capacity, and expanding the network associated with large urban developments can take between five and eight years. The network cannot begin to be built when the demand has already arrived.
In this sense, distributors have repeatedly expressed their willingness to invest to generate more capacity. The overall investment limit set by the regulator is only part of the problem. There is also the cost of the connection and the development of new network extensions, and who assumes it; and there is a remuneration model that, for a decade, has been designed primarily to limit the system cost for the end user, not to facilitate the network's growth where it is needed. As long as these three factors are not reviewed together, the investment willingness of distributors will continue to run up against a framework that holds it back.
It should be clear that not all projects that stall do so due to a technical lack of capacity: in a good number of cases, the network can indeed absorb the connection, but the cost of bringing electricity to the development is so high that the project ceases to be viable. Several developments are known to have been stopped for exactly this reason, not because there was a lack of capacity at the connection point, but because the developer could not assume the cost of the necessary infrastructure. When the project finally moves forward, this cost ends up being passed on to the price of housing. The regulation of the connection, on its own, can hinder a residential development even if the network says yes.
To understand how we got here, we must go back to 2013. Spain was coming from an electricity system with an accumulated tariff deficit of about 24 billion euros, which was growing at a rate of about 3 billion each year, and the regulatory priority at that time was clear: stop the hole and control costs. The distribution network ended up assuming a large part of the consequences—via investment limits and a restrictive remuneration model—without ever having been the one that generated that deficit. In 2026, the question should be: how do we prevent the lack of network capacity from holding back the growth of the economy?
For Catalonia, with an important industrial structure, having a network prepared to absorb new demand ceases to be just an energy issue and becomes a competitiveness issue.
The electric vehicle is a good example that this mismatch has more nuances than it seems. Most of the charging is done and will be done at home, with low power levels because the vehicle can be plugged in for hours at night; this charging does not require increasing the contracted power, and the charger can be installed without major procedures. The problem would appear in the long term and in an aggregate manner: if a high percentage of the vehicle fleet began to charge simultaneously in similar time slots, it would change the utilization coefficient of each user, and that could indeed come to demand from the low-voltage network a response capacity for which it was not sized.
Charging in public spaces poses a different problem. Here, the trend is to install high-power chargers to reduce waiting time, and there can indeed be real problems with access to the network. But in many cases, the bottleneck is not technical, but administrative: processing a new line on non-urbanizable land before the Generalitat is a long and complex process. This is one of the main reasons why many gas stations, especially those located on highways and far from a robust network, still do not have fast chargers.
It would be unfair to say that the regulation has not moved. Royal Decree 640/2026, approved last July, raises the investment limits in networks until 2030 and explicitly directs part of the investment towards anticipatory actions and digitalization; BBVA Research calculates that the set of measures can mobilize up to 17.9 billion euros in additional funds. CNMC Circular 8/2025, in effect since the end of 2025, has also changed the remuneration methodology with a multi-year trajectory based on TOTEX and new incentives for efficient investment.
There are still two pieces left to solve. It is necessary to redefine what physical access to the network means, because today it is primarily a paper-based procedure and should correspond to a real connection. It is also necessary to review how new network extensions are planned, still based on the criterion of vegetative growth of demand. This concept has become obsolete. It was real until the end of the century, but in absolute terms, we have had stagnant demand for 25 years. New electrification needs appear more rapidly, concentrated, and unevenly across the territory. Changing RD 1048/2013 is, in this sense, an unavoidable step if a serious electrification of the country is desired.
Catalonia has a concrete advantage today: it still retains a margin that other territories with higher saturation have already spent. This margin will be exhausted if investments do not anticipate demand, rather than just following it. Building more housing, reindustrializing the economy, electrifying mobility, and decarbonizing productive activity requires having the grid prepared beforehand, not after.
The debate over RD 1048/2013, investment limits, or the remuneration of distributors seems technical, but it affects very concrete things: whether a factory will be able to open, whether a neighborhood will be able to be built, whether Catalonia will be able to electrify itself before the available capacity becomes an even scarcer resource. Madrid already shows what happens when the grid arrives after the need. Catalonia has the opportunity, still open, to get there first.