Goodbye, for now to the mess. The rollout of the floating electricity-generation plant of 125 megawatts (MW) projected by Turkey’s Karadeniz Holding, under the Karpowership brand, is entering a phase of technical and political paralysis, pushing back its material execution. Despite the institutional campaign mounted by the company’s envoys before the Port Authority of Las Palmas and the Cabildo de Gran Canaria, technical and political consensus on the archipelago is moving toward dismantling the emergency project’s feasibility, ruling out any executive authorization at least until after the municipal elections.
The Totisa precedent and the health filter
The legal viability of the power-ship clashes head-on with precedents on public health and environmental permits within the port area. Technicians from the Health Department of the Government of the Canary Islands are assessing the file through the strict lens of past records tied to Totisa Holding, under whose gas-generation project at the dock was rejected after Public Health issued an unfavorable report over the dispersion of polluting emissions near La Isleta, the urban core. The ship’s six chimneys—of the Shark class—designed to burn petroleum derivatives such as fuel oil or diesel, present an emissions scenario incompatible with regional health guidelines, pointing to an identical administrative block by medical inspection authorities.
Electoral timing and Nueva Canarias’ rejection
The political calendar adds a strategic blocking factor to the application. The regional government of Coalición Canaria and its management partners are avoiding the electoral cost that would come with authorizing the installation of a large-scale fossil-fuel combustion infrastructure just meters from the residential population ahead of the local polls. Nueva Canarias, the party led on the island by Cabildo president Antonio Morales, has voiced a flat-out rejection, raising the political temperature further. The party describes the Turkish proposal as a pollution patch and a step backward in the island’s decarbonization process, turning the vote on the license into an unacceptable political risk for the port’s board of directors in the short term.
Impact on the commercial berth line
The Port Authority of Las Palmas maintains an extremely cautious stance regarding the direct economic impact of the operation on ordinary commercial activity. Tethering or inner anchoring of the floating plant in the Dársena de África would immediately reduce between 162 and 200 meters of the commercial-berthing line for a minimum period of five years. The port employers’ association and the technical team of the institution’s president, Beatriz Calzada, reject outright sacrificing logistics operations and the business line of the consignee companies indefinitely in order to accommodate an energy facility that raises serious safety concerns.
Sovereignty of the board of directors
The Ministry of Ecological Transition and Energy, led by Mariano Hernández Zapata, defends the power-ship, citing reports from Red Eléctrica de España that warn of the risk of a zero-energy situation in Gran Canaria due to the obsolescence of the land-based plants in Jinámar and Barranco de Tirajana. However, the final word lies sovereignly with the Board of Directors of the Port of Las Palmas. Without its favorable vote, the project would lack legal coverage for its deployment. Rejection by residents of La Isleta, together with the anticipated opposition from Public Health and the advisability of postponing the final resolution beyond the local elections, leaves the Turkish floating solution facing a definitive technical deadlock.
The post Social opposition and the election calendar stall Karadeniz’s Turkish power-ship in Las Palmas first appeared on ecanarymaritime.com.
