Ninety-two point two percent. That’s the share of electricity La Palma generated in 2025 by burning diesel in its island power plants. La Gomera comes in at 89.2%, Lanzarote at 88.8%. These are the numbers Red Eléctrica published in mid-August in its report on the Canary Islands’ 2025 electricity system, and they describe an archipelago where the wind blows hard along the coast year-round without that translating into enough clean power.
Taken together, the Canary Islands covered only 21% of their final electricity consumption with renewables in 2025, against a Spanish national average of 55.5%. Wind contributed 15%, solar 5%, and the wind-hydro system on El Hierro, often held up as a model, barely reached 0.3%. Installed renewable capacity grew 7.4% compared with 2024, but the overall progress has been modest: from 19% in 2023 to 20.8% in 2024 and 21% last year.
The environmental cost is measurable: 4.9 million tonnes of CO2 in 2025, 16.6% of national electricity-sector emissions, even though Canary Islands demand accounts for barely 4% of Spain’s total. Tenerife alone accounts for 40.2% of regional consumption, followed by Gran Canaria (37.6%) and Fuerteventura (9%).
What stands out is that this isn’t a funding problem. Since 2021, the Canary Islands have received more than 1.7 billion euros through the EU’s Next Generation program, but execution of projects tied to the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism has lagged. August 31, 2026 is the deadline to complete and justify those projects; if the pace doesn’t pick up, the archipelago risks losing ground on climate goals and a share of that European funding.
The picture is complicated further by fragmentation: seven isolated island power grids, only two of which have recently been interconnected (Lanzarote-Fuerteventura and Tenerife-La Gomera), which makes any decarbonization plan slower and costlier than it would be on the mainland. In Spain’s regional ranking for green electricity generation, the Canary Islands sit third from bottom, ahead only of the Basque Country and the Balearic Islands.
Anyone living in La Palma or Lanzarote experiences this every day, whether they realize it or not: behind the switch that turns the lights on, nine times out of ten, a diesel engine is running. Red Eléctrica’s next review will show whether the renewable megawatts announced in recent months are finally moving the needle, or whether August 31 arrives with the construction sites still idle.
