The update of the Navarra Energy Plan goes unnoticed. The Government of Navarre made this public and, at the end of the period for the submission of claims, no government official has explained to us what their proposals are to the citizens.

The reading of the documentation submitted by the Government shows that there is no improvement over the initial version. It is still a plan that does not plan any action, that allows companies to act as they like and that continues to be bound by a supposed energy transition that is not launched, due to serious structural problems and high environmental impacts.

The data on energy and CO2 emissions presented to us by the update of the plan are very worrying. Thus, energy consumption in Navarre has been increasing for more than ten years, including that of fossil fuels. Fuels make up 79.31% of the total primary energy we consume. It is clear that greenhouse gas emissions in Navarre will continue to increase. In CO2 we have reached 6.9 million tonnes in 2021, very close to the peak reached in 2005, and in the last ten years there has been an upward trend.

Therefore, this development is worrying and goes very far in the opposite direction to the energy transition and to what is intended by the Foral Law on Climate Change, as they are supposed to try to reduce emissions and deal with the climate emergency. And it is paradigmatic that this happens in Navarra, where it is a pioneer in the renewable energy sector, and also in the very dispersed land.

In this regard, it seems clear to us that a document that looks to the future, such as the Navarre Energy Plan, should at least analyse these facts and propose different planning alternatives to try to correct the problem. To raise this issue, several scenarios of the future are usually described. In these situations, different decision-making alternatives are proposed and possible results are analyzed over time.

In the case of this Energy Plan, only two scenarios are studied. A "trend", for which it is proposed to do only what is currently being done. Another so-called "efficiency or destination" is, as its name suggests, the one chosen as a plan to be developed and which proposes to deepen the current path of implementation of many more renewable energy infrastructures.

It is clear that the analysis forgets that everything that has been done so far has not served to change the trend and prevent the increase in fossil fuel consumption and the emission of greenhouse gases. In this way, this plan may continue to increase the two serious problems that have led us to the current climate emergency.

In fact, the intention to reduce consumption does not appear in the plan. This aspect, which we consider to be the only way to deal with the problem we face, has not been analyzed or in a document that should analyze all possible scenarios to, once analyzed, choose the most appropriate option. It is therefore clear that the Government of Navarre does not plan on energy.

We are dealing with a small document, with significant deficiencies in which the government would need to put in place targeted actions and yet they are not even mentioned. For example, as far as mobility is concerned, which is the sector that consumes the most fossil fuel, the most obvious solution would be to develop an important public transport network using the already electrified conventional train. And yet the plan is again limited to the promotion of the electric car and does not mention the train. The same is true of natural gas, which it continues to promote in order to increase its deployment, while allowing the illegal Castejón Thermal Power Plants to continue to operate.

Because that's one of the pillars of this plan. Private companies decide what projects they want to do, when and under what conditions they want to put them, and based on that, the government writes a text in which it says "is being planned." But in reality this is done by companies, for their benefit, of course. For example, in the case of wind power, since the first version, in 2018, the plan includes priority installation areas. Well, it can be seen that in many of the areas marked in the plan there are already wind installations. And there are also many other wind farms that are still being installed outside of these priority areas. That is, of course, because businesses decide where to put the infrastructure.

To this must be added the lack of regulation of the soils that can be implanted by wind and photovoltaic installations, as required by the Foral Law on Climate Change, which should be completed one year after its approval, that is, by March 2023. More than a year after that date, these maps remain in the limbo, and the only reference we have about their evolution is a phrase in this energy plan, by which we know that the wind map would be in the "current execution phase". And there's no mention of the map of the photovoltaic sun. Another point that the government does not comply with the Climate Change Act.

Subai Erakuntza reflected in the allegations presented these and other problems of this plan. And we summarize them here, because we believe it is necessary to know that our government has no interest in dealing effectively with the problems that we have to address. Because it is necessary to involve citizens in the definition of the future of Navarra and to propose alternative ways and experiences in the management of energy. In fact, the Government’s Energy Plan, as we have seen, does not respond to the challenges ahead.

Jule Goñi and Martín Zelaia, members of the Subai Erakuntza Foundation.