# Gorona del Viento: A volcano for a battery

- URL : https://www.inexpeditions.com/en/in100/un-volcan-pour-batterie
- Language : English
- Publisher : in:Expeditions SAS, 8 rue Lacépède, 75005 Paris, bonjour@inexpeditions.com
- Place : Gorona del Viento, Valverde, El Hierro, Canaries, ES (https://www.goronadelviento.es/)

> On El Hierro, in the Canaries, a wind farm can meet the island’s entire electricity demand. The surplus pumps water up to a reservoir at La Caldera, near…

A volcano for a battery

## Gorona del Viento

goronadelviento.es

On El Hierro, in the Canaries, a wind farm can meet the island’s entire electricity demand. The surplus pumps water up to a reservoir at La Caldera, near Valverde; when the wind drops, the water runs back down through the turbines. The Gorona del Viento plant has been running since 2014.

The idea was born in the early 1980s; in 1997 the island council adopted a plan to make El Hierro self-sufficient, and work began in 2009. In 2025 the plant delivered 1,049 hours of fully renewable supply and avoided 5,591 tonnes of diesel and 21,551 tonnes of greenhouse gases; the diesel engine now runs only when there is not enough wind or water. A team follows a project carried for nearly forty years by a whole island, and what a transition takes when you can only rely on yourself.

Visits must be requested at least a week ahead, at info@goronadelviento.es or +34 922 55 24 38, saying whether the visit is general or technical. Each group has at most 15 people, aged 12 and over, and every visitor is identified for access control. The tour shows the pumping system, the hydraulic turbines, the lower reservoir and the control room.

Photo credits : Wikiyco (Wikimedia Commons, CC0) ; Casacanarias (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0) ; Carlos Teixidor Cadenas (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0) ; European Union, Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery (Wikimedia Commons, attribution (Copernicus))

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Source : https://www.inexpeditions.com/en/in100/un-volcan-pour-batterie · in:Expeditions, learning expeditions and impact retreats since 2015.