Norway’s state-owned utility Statkraft has completed the first phase of its Montes de Cierzo wind repowering project in Navarra, replacing 44 ageing turbines with 10 modern machines and recovering or reusing 98 percent of the dismantled equipment. The April 21 milestone, announced from Oslo, hardens Statkraft’s status as one of the largest Nordic anchors inside the Iberian renewables market — a footprint that reaches across the Spanish border into Portuguese solar at Santarém and into 2.1 GW of contracted Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) capacity across the peninsula.
The Montes de Cierzo upgrade is small in absolute terms but symbolic. The wind farm dates back to one of the first generations of large Iberian wind installations and had reached the end of its useful life. By rebuilding it with taller, more efficient turbines, Statkraft is demonstrating that European repowering can be done with very high circularity standards: more than 100 tonnes of equipment have been redirected to second-life operation rather than scrapped. The first phase was supported by €4.6 million in public funding from Spain’s Institute for Energy Diversification and Saving (IDAE), and by an unusual citizen co-investment scheme that pulled in 250 mostly local Navarrese investors with €5 million in equity — the largest community-funded renewables vehicle in Spain to date.
The project will reach 90 MW once Phase 2 completes in 2027, when the remaining 41 turbines will be replaced with just four new units and a 14.26 MW battery storage system added. The repowering pattern — fewer, much larger turbines, plus storage — is the template that Statkraft and its Iberian peers expect to apply across the dozens of Spanish and Portuguese wind sites built between 1998 and 2008 that are now technically obsolete but still hold premium grid connection rights.
Why Portugal matters in the Statkraft story. Statkraft entered the Iberian market in 2018 and formally launched dedicated Spanish and Portuguese wind and solar development activities in 2019. The most visible Portuguese position is its long-term PPA covering three NextEnergy Capital photovoltaic plants in Santarém totalling 210 MW of installed capacity and an estimated 341 GWh of annual generation — enough clean electricity to cover roughly 98,000 Portuguese households. That contract sits inside a broader 2.1 GW Iberian PPA portfolio that makes Statkraft the largest single Nordic offtaker active in the Spanish-Portuguese wholesale market.
The strategic logic is straightforward. Iberian wholesale power prices have fallen to record lows in early 2026 thanks to the buildout of solar and the residual effect of last spring’s grid restructuring after the April 2025 blackout. That has created a window in which long-dated PPAs can be signed at structurally low strike prices — an attractive hedge for Nordic industrial offtakers who are otherwise exposed to volatile Nord Pool prices and to a tightening Swedish bidding zone SE3. Statkraft’s scale on both sides of the corridor positions it as a natural counterparty for Nordic buyers wanting to lock in Iberian green megawatt-hours under EU renewable energy guarantees of origin.
Portugal as the next repowering frontier. The Montes de Cierzo template is highly relevant for Portugal. The Iberian neighbour’s wind fleet is broadly the same vintage as the Spanish one being repowered now, and the Portuguese government has signalled it intends to issue a dedicated repowering decree later in 2026 to clarify permitting timelines and grid access. Statkraft has not yet announced a Portuguese repowering project, but executives have publicly noted that the company is actively scouting opportunities in the Iberian Peninsula — language that, in Statkraft parlance, generally precedes a project pipeline announcement by twelve to eighteen months.
For Nordic supply chains, the announcement is also a quiet opening. Phase 2 of Montes de Cierzo will need turbine logistics, battery integration and grid balancing services that are increasingly being supplied by Danish and Swedish specialists. Eiffage Energía Sistemas handled balance-of-plant on Phase 1, but several of the second-life equipment routes — blade recycling, gearbox refurbishment — route through Nordic circularity specialists in Denmark and Norway. The project is, in that sense, a working showroom of the Nordic-Iberian green industrial logic.
What the next twelve months will reveal is whether Statkraft converts its Iberian leadership in PPAs into outright project ownership at scale on both sides of the border. The company is currently developing more than 1.5 GW of new renewable capacity in Spain on top of 650 MW already operational and 730 MW of third-party solar capacity it manages. If even a fraction of that pipeline migrates west into Portugal — following the same playbook of long-dated PPAs followed by direct development — Statkraft could quickly become one of the most consequential Nordic energy investors in the Portuguese transition story.