A The following sentence runs the risk of sounding like an advertisement slogan, but there is no better way to say it: the future of energy has already begun. “In 2020 we had around 500 megawatts (MW) of distributed production [instalações que dão para autoconsumo ou para vender energia à rede]. Today there are 2000 MW, that is, four times more”, says the general director of the General Directorate of Energy and Geology (DGEG), Jerónimo Cunha. In total, he details, there are already “197 thousand self-consumption installations†in Portugal. Added to this is electric mobility. “We passed 500 orders [de ligação à rede] in 2021 for 1800 orders in 2023†, an official source from E-Redes tells Expresso. In other words, it is also almost four times more in just two years. And there are also 5 gigawatts (GW) of renewables, that is, wind and solar farms that are not for self-consumption.
