With a military base nearby and a Baleària passenger terminal very close, the reconfiguration of the maritime transport map and logistics infrastructure at the port of Las Palmas has entered a decisive phase of public capital allocation for its development. In the U.S. the Trump administration announced the immediate suspension of all offshore wind energy projects under construction in the United States. The argument used is national security risks. The Swedish government has canceled 13 offshore wind energy projects for reasons of national military defense. In Las Palmas, however, the Turkish energy ship projected for the same area is being placed, and someone must have thought about the loss of profit.
Joan Groizard Payeras, in his capacity as president of the Institute for Diversification and Energy Saving (IDAE), has signed the definitive resolution of the state program PORT-EOLMAR, an institutional mechanism funded by the European Union through the NextGenerationEU Recovery and Resilience Mechanism, which will inject a total of 212 million euros into the general interest port network of the State to carry out the necessary physical adaptations aimed at deploying offshore wind platforms and other renewable marine energies.
Financial project
Within this distribution of financial quotas by maritime regions, the Macaronesian Atlantic Subregion of the Canary Islands (SAMC) has secured a strategic allocation concentrated in a single high-priority technical file, granting the Port Authority of Las Palmas the direct award of a net grant of 30,000,000 euros for a committed subsidizable cost of 49.6 million euros, designed to reconfigure the Gran Canaria docks as the main floating ‘assembly’ logistics hub in the Central Atlantic.
The process of competitive concurrence, formally closed after the technical correction and appeal deadlines expired last June, underlines the aggressive commercial competition among various port authorities in the country for control of the future ‘value’ industrial chain of maritime transport of energy components.
48 months
The financial deployment of PORT-EOLMAR in the Canary Islands is not limited to the adaptation of publicly owned infrastructure; the definitive resolution mandatorily ties the state grant to the execution of an investment in an associated industrial project worth 31,044,935 euros. This flow of private capital must be formally justified before the administration within a maximum period of five years, ensuring the installation of heavy-duty cranes and heavy-duty rolling areas prepared for the traffic of oversized wind components.
The Port Authority of Las Palmas has a non-extendable deadline of 48 months for the completion of the physical adaptation works on the quay lines and operational yards, a time frame that automatically begins following the electronic publication of the final document, assuming the effects of legal notification for all interested maritime transport operators.
Upon completion of this period, the public entity will have a three-month window to register the documentary justification of construction expenses before the State Technical Valuation Commission. The maintenance of the 30 million euros awarded is conditioned to comply with the principle of not causing significant harm to the environment, a community customs directive that requires monitoring dredging, filling, and foundation operations on the islands’ coastline to prevent negative impacts on marine biodiversity in the Atlantic environment, while activating strict governance protocols under EU Regulation 2024/2509 to eliminate any potential conflicts of interest during civil works tender offers to be executed in the port area until 2030.
