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The grey ground
“The ground is grey. Dry and hard like the lignite that for decades fed the boilers of the power plant. That’s what makes them different from all the others.” With these words, a colleague from Endesa described the place where construction on the Sedéis V solar plant was beginning. Later, another one called Mudéjar would follow.
A few years ago, during the presentation of the book "De carbón es la luz", held at the Casa de la Cultura de Andorra, none of those present—local people, power plant workers and myself—imagined that the areas of Valdeserrana, Mas de Perlé and Parque de Carbones, which were once the coal dumps where that dark mineral was stored and left its mark on the land, would come to host the first two solar plants of Endesa within the perimeter of the old thermal power station.
Today, the surroundings are a constant coming and going of trucks, technicians at work, and new faces drinking their hot coffee in the bars of Andorra and neighbouring villages. Hundreds of people who, like small ants, are now raising the structures that will capture Teruel’s sun and turn it into energy, just as was done for forty years at the plant, but now with clean energy.
Sedeis V and Mudejar will precede fourteen more facilities, using different technologies, which will be built—these ones, indeed—within the Mudéjar Just Transition Node, Endesa’s largest renewable project in the Iberian Peninsula and one of the social projects that will most profoundly shape the area.
Last summer marked four years since the closure of the Andorra thermal power plant. How time flies! That moment put an end to the coal industry in Teruel and sparked an unprecedented socioeconomic transformation, opening a new chapter in the region’s history.
Endesa, a longstanding reference in the area, presented an ambitious project to shift from coal-based energy production to clean energy just months after the shutdown. The plan was—and still is—different, not only because of its scale but also because it is pioneering.
In fact, it is the first of its kind to be developed in Spain and at the European level, serving as a global benchmark in energy transition. It will generate activity and wealth across all associated sectors. It is sustainable and responsible, and it prioritizes the protection of the environment in the broadest sense, as well as the protection of ecosystems. Its development is based on deep technical and environmental expertise and an unprecedented social dimension. It will succeed.
Sedéis and Mudéjar were the first. More will come. Today, the light is no longer from coal, but it is still light.
