Malaga's power grid shortages stall 142 housing and business projects

Energy

Municipal company Endesa has rejected around 20 housing projects across the province since January 2025

Jesús Hinojosa

Malaga

The grid capacity shortage in Malaga province is a very present and pressing concern. According to e-Distribución (public company Endesa's distributor), the public provider has rejected a total of 142 housing and business projects in the province since January 2025 due to insufficient capacity to supply the required power.

As SUR reported on Monday, the saturation of the electricity transmission network, resulting from poor planning regarding the supply demands of new urban developments in Malaga and other parts of Andalucía, has led Endesa to issue reports for over a year denying applications for projects exceeding five megawatts of power (equivalent to approximately 750 homes).

Endesa has stopped approving projects in the Costa del Sol that require more than one megawatt of power, enough electricity for around 150 homes. The delays in the construction of two substations further exacerbates network saturation.

Of the 142 projects, 17 are residential developments requiring a total of 215 megawatts of power at a time when the grid capacity is at zero for the province.

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Endesa has also rejected 97 electricity storage facilities (with a demand of 204 megawatts), 12 data centres and similar activities (187 megawatts), seven industrial projects (130 megawatts), a business park (ten megawatts), a water treatment plant (eight megawatts), another project within the 'public and rail transport' category (two megawatts) and six other projects of various types (a total of 82 megawatts).

Endesa admits that the electricity grid "is going through a critical moment due to the sustained flood of unique access and connection requests resulting from electrification and reindustrialisation". The culprit is "the high-voltage connection nodes".

Everything points to energy giant Red Eléctrica as responsible for guaranteeing the transmission of high voltage throughout the country, as such saturation of the network happens in other regions as well.

E-Distribution says that, in the case of Andalucía, "the pressure is especially intense", because the power requests they have received have gone from 964 megawatts in 2020 to 8.2 gigawatts in 2024 (eight times more) and 5.75 gigawatts in 2025.

This has forced Endesa to reject 75 per cent of the projects it receives. According to the distributor, currently only the provinces of Cordoba and Seville have "some availability" to accommodate new projects larger than five megawatts. The remaining provinces "are completely saturated". "The operating margin is practically nonexistent," Endesa says.

"Relying solely on capacity freed up by unexecuted projects or on ad hoc reinforcements means always lagging behind demand," Endesa states. Given this situation, the electricity company is calling for "network upgrades before a specific request is made, with the aim of preparing the system to absorb future growth and providing certainty for industrial and technology investors".

The solution lies in the construction and commissioning of the electrical substations that have been pending for years, as well as those in the new five-year plan extending to 2030.

The Ministry for Ecological Transition has to approve said plan, after consulting with the distribution companies. Endesa has submitted 84 objections to this plan, 26 of which pertain to Andalucía. "Planning must anticipate demand if we want to preserve regional competitiveness," the company says.