"They're people from the port of Las Palmas who want to fill our coast with turbines when we live off tourism, and they tell tourists the fish is locally sourced. They need to make up their minds: turbines or food sovereignty?" This is how a fisherman from Castillo del Romeral expressed himself to Maspalomas24H this Monday upon learning that the megaturbine project for the port of Arinaga is now history, implying that the test site in the south of the island, which was sold in 2015, has been a failure.
The artisanal fishing sector and the independent tourism industry of southern Gran Canaria, which doesn't depend on funding from Las Palmas, are watching the ashes of the Gamesa G128-5.0MW wind turbine in the port of Arinaga with barely concealed relief. For the fishermen, who for years have staunchly resisted the expansion of offshore wind in their traditional fishing grounds, the destruction of this 160-meter-high behemoth is not a tragedy, but rather the validation of their worst fears about the safety of these megastructures. The image of the charred rotor, a structure designed to sweep more than 12.000 square meters, now symbolizes the collapse of a model of forced industrialization that locals perceive as a tool for financial speculation controlled from the offices in Las Palmas.
The disaster marks the end of a €15 million investment, a combination of public and private capital, leaving behind a wreck of scrap metal where the future of offshore energy in Spain was once envisioned. This giant, with a nominal power of 5.000 kW, which in 2013 boasted record-breaking electricity generation capacity, enough to supply more than 10.000 homes in a single month, has succumbed to a catastrophic fire within its own safety zone. The loss of this strategic asset directly impacts the structure of Megaturbinas de Arinaga, a company partly owned by the Las Palmas Ports Foundation, which was already facing a vulnerable situation with financial losses due to defaults exceeding €95.000 at the close of 2024.
For artisanal fishermen, the demise of the "15 million euro wind turbine" offers a respite from the pressure exerted by industrial companies seeking to colonize the southern coast with large-scale wind farms. Local residents and the tourism sector maintain that the south of the island thrives on its landscape and the sea, activities that clash head-on with the waste-to-energy business promoted by the Arinaga developers under the umbrella of file ER12/0018. The turbine's disappearance eliminates the operating privileges and power exemptions enjoyed by this R&D prototype, whose power density promised to revolutionize a sector that today only leaves traces of soot on the Agüimes dock.
The technical failure of the G128 model, equipped with 62,5-meter fiberglass and carbon fiber blades, exposes the weaknesses of betting on energy sovereignty based on cutting-edge technologies that fail under critical conditions. Despite being designed to withstand wind speeds of up to 80 m/s, the permanent magnet synchronous generator could not avoid its own destruction, jeopardizing Gran Canaria's position as a global scientific leader just before the next offshore wind auction. Fishermen's distrust of the management of these assets has grown as they observe contradictory figures in the owning company's financial statements, with operating results that clash with the reality of a completely unusable turbine.
Southern residents see this fire as an opportunity to curb speculation that seeks to drag the island into a financial enterprise divorced from the realities of the service sector. The fear of the horizon becoming filled with blackened hulls 120 meters high has united groups that traditionally did not share common ground, but who now agree that the real return on these cutting-edge investments is nil when they end up engulfed in flames. The islands' energy sovereignty cannot depend on infrastructure that threatens the integrity of fishing grounds and the aesthetics of a tourist destination that shuns the image of a marine industrial park projected by large corporations.
The resolution from the Directorate General of Industry and Energy that formalized the transfer of ownership of Megaturbinas Arinaga has lost its practical meaning after the fire. The legal framework designed to operate this multi-megawatt testing platform is now up in the air, leaving an open wound on the Arinaga dock and raising uncomfortable questions about the safety of future offshore installations planned off the southern coast. While the remains of the Gamesa turbine await dismantling, the fishing sector and local residents remain vigilant, hoping that the industrial skyline of the southeast will not again threaten the economic stability of an island that refuses to become a testing ground for foreign investors.
