Twenty metres below sea level, inside a 1,300-metre intake pipe, Atlantic seawater has begun flowing toward the interior of Gran Canaria. The island’s Water Council (Consejo Insular de Aguas) has confirmed that seawater intake for the Salto de Chira project is complete, and that desalination plant testing is now underway ahead of pumping water, in the coming months, to the Soria reservoir.
The project links two old volcanic craters in the island’s interior, Chira and Soria, and it is designed to do two things at once: store renewable energy and produce desalinated water. The principle is that of pumped hydro storage, already used elsewhere in Europe, applied here to an island with no permanent rivers, one that depends almost entirely on wells, desalination plants and these two artificial reservoirs for its water.
The connecting works are just as demanding as the offshore intake. Seventeen kilometres of pipeline run along the bed of the Arguineguín ravine, while most of the four kilometres of main and secondary tunnels needed for pumping have already been built. According to the Water Council, pumping from the desalination plant to the Soria reservoir will begin in the coming months, in any case before the year is out.
Anyone familiar with Gran Canaria’s interior knows Chira and Soria are not just any reservoirs. They are among the island’s few large bodies of water, tucked into a landscape of ravines and terraced fields that has lived with water scarcity for decades. Folding them into an energy storage scheme means trying to solve, at the same time, two problems that have always travelled together on the islands: where to find water, and how to depend less on fossil fuels.
Here is how the system will work. During hours of high renewable output, when the wind is blowing or the sun is high, water gets pumped from the lower reservoir to the upper one. When electricity demand rises and renewable output drops, the water flows back down, driving turbines that feed power back into the grid. It is the same principle that allows many European power grids to absorb growing shares of wind and solar without breaking the balance between supply and demand, adapted here to the constraints of an isolated island grid like Gran Canaria’s.
This is not the first time this infrastructure has made headlines over the past few years, and it probably will not be the last. But the completion of seawater intake marks a concrete, verifiable step in a project that spent a long time in construction limbo without firm dates. There is now a timeframe, set by the Water Council itself, for pumping to begin toward Soria, and that timeframe is what separates this update from a routine institutional announcement.
It remains to be seen how the full system will perform once operational, and what its real impact will be on electricity bills and on water available for agriculture in the island’s south, questions for which no verifiable data exists yet. But the works, this time, have stopped being just a project on paper. They have started drinking seawater.
