The Cortes-La Muela complex, located in an impressive canyon of deep blue waters of the J\u00facar River, began construction of its first phase in 1983. At that time, the Cortes dam was installed, with a height of 116 metres and arch-gravity type, with an installed power of 290 MW, and La Muela I, which has 634\u00a0MW of power in turbination and 549 MW in pumping. The upper reservoir occupies more than one million square metres and is capable of supplying the daily domestic consumption of 6.75 million people.<\/p>\n
In 2015, the complex was expanded with the construction of the La Muela II hydroelectric power plant. With an installed capacity of 880\u00a0MW in turbination and 744 MW in pumping, this new facility made this complex the largest installed capacity in Europe with more than 1,800 MW in turbination and 1,293 MW in pumping.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, while the Cortes II plant was created from an artificial cylindrical shaft, the La Muela I and La Muela II plants are underground in a cavern and 635,000 m3 and 270,000 m3 were excavated for their construction, respectively.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In these two hydroelectric power plants, the lower reservoir is connected to the upper reservoir by means of two penstocks that bridge a 500-metre drop, one 4.80 metres in diameter and 950 metres long in the case of La Muela and the other 5.45 metres in diameter and 850 metres long in the case of La Muela II.\u00a0<\/p>\n
These pumping stations are the only mass electricity storage systems and allow efficient management of peak hour coverage. At times when there is surplus energy in the system – from traditional or unmanageable renewable technology, instead of disconnecting facilities from the grid, it is possible to use this surplus energy to pump water and store it in a reservoir or overhead tank.<\/p>\n
In the particular case of the Cortes-La Muela power plant, with what it produces during a year, it is able to supply\u00a0the annual electricity\u00a0demand of almost 600,000 homes, while avoiding the annual emission of 160,000 tonnes of CO2.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Cortes-La Muela complex, located in an impressive canyon of deep blue waters of the J\u00facar River, began…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17675,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[146],"class_list":{"0":"post-17674","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-iberdrola","8":"tag-iberdrola"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17674\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}