• The story of the Zalia substation perfectly illustrates the mismatch that often exists between urban planning and the reality of energy supply.

  • The real key to 21st-century economic development does not travel on wheels or rails: it travels as electrons through electrical distribution substations.

  • You can do everything right—land, incentives, investment attraction—and still lose the project if the grid does not keep up.

  • In October 2025, 26% of Asturian substations had no spare capacity; five months later, that figure exceeded 37%.

  • Electrical planning can no longer lag behind industrial planning.

July 17, 2026.

Imagine you have €670 million ready to be invested, a detailed plan to create 2,600 jobs, and a commitment to build Europe’s first silicon wafer plant. The market is eager for your technology and the land has been secured. However, there is a missing cable. A node in an invisible network that determines whether your project will come to life in 2028 or will have to wait and see if the wind blows in your favor.

This is the crossroads currently facing the Zona de Actividades Logísticas e Industriales de Asturias (ZALIA) in Gijón, with the arrival of the tech giant Sunwafe. The debate on major infrastructure tends to focus on asphalt, railways, or port terminals. However, the real key to 21st-century economic development does not travel on wheels or rails: it travels as electrons through electrical distribution substations.

Two decades to switch on the power

The story of the Zalia substation perfectly illustrates the mismatch that often exists between urban planning and the reality of energy supply. With a trajectory that dates back conceptually nearly two decades, and whose first stone was laid in 2010, the confirmation that the new e-Redes infrastructure will not be operational until 2028 has raised alarms among the region’s business community.

This is not just an administrative delay, but a time barrier that conditions an investment of strategic regional impact. Although the authorities insist that the timeline “will arrive on time” for Sunwafe—which plans to make its final decision in February 2027—the margin for maneuver is minimal.

A substation is not just a substation

For years, substations have remained out of the public spotlight, treated as an almost invisible technical infrastructure. But they are the piece that allows a factory to start up, a project to electrify, or an investment to stay instead of moving elsewhere. In Zalia, it is not just about “bringing power” to an industrial park: it is about making viable a logistics area meant to organize activity, land, employment, and supply chains.

The industrial map is no longer drawn by logistics, but by the grid

For decades, a region competed to attract industry with cheap land, good transport connections, and a skilled workforce. Today there is a fourth factor that weighs as much as or more than the other three: literally having somewhere to plug in the factory. Zalia has the logistics—next to the port of Gijón, the highway, and the airport—it has the land, and now it even has the tenant. The only thing it has lacked, for twenty years, is the technical clearance for that factory to start its machines.

This carries an uncomfortable message for industrial policy: you can do everything right—land, incentives, investment attraction—and still lose the project if the grid does not keep up.

The paradox of decarbonization without a grid

This local scenario is not an isolated case, but the manifestation of a structural problem that we have been analyzing at Foro Industria y Energía: we have been analyzing. In October 2025, 26% of Asturian substations had no spare capacity; five months later, in March 2026, that figure exceeded 37%, with a net loss of 136 megawatts in the regional grid.

As recently noted by Carlos Navalpotro, president of Asturiana de Zinc (AZSA) and of the association of large energy consumers (AEGE), many industries want to decarbonize but do not have the technical access to do so: we are trying to accelerate the electrification of production processes while forcing large industrial sites to operate under a de facto rationing of connection capacity.

From planning to urgent execution

The Zalia case shows that the solution does not require more forums for debate, but rather unprecedented bureaucratic acceleration: the processing of electricity transmission and distribution projects cannot continue moving at last-century speeds while global competition to attract investment is measured in weeks.

It is urgent for public administrations, the system operator, and distribution companies to collaborate in a coordinated way to proactively size key grid nodes and avoid the “ostrich tactic,” something we already raised with the president of Red Eléctrica, Beatriz Corredor, in an open letter last June.

What Zalia teaches for the future

Zalia will presumably have its substation and its factory. But the cost of those twenty years—talent that went elsewhere, investment that hesitated, the credibility of a logistics area that for a long time was only a promise—cannot be recovered. The lesson for the rest of Asturias’s and Spain’s industrial parks is that electrical planning can no longer lag behind industrial planning: if the grid decides, it is better that it decides on time, not when the factory already has a buyer and the machines are waiting.