14/10/2026
A whole island unplugged itself from oil, and almost no tourist who flies in even notices.
El Hierro is the smallest of the populated Canary Islands, home to roughly 11,000 people, and it sits too far out in the Atlantic for an undersea power cable to reach the others. For decades it ran entirely on imported diesel, hauled in by ship and burned in a single power station beside the sea. Then, in 2014, the Gorona del Viento plant switched on: five wind turbines on an exposed ridge feeding a pair of reservoirs set hundreds of metres apart in altitude.
Here is the clever part. Electricity is hard to store at this scale, so the island stores water instead. Surplus wind energy pumps water uphill into a reservoir built inside an old volcanic crater. When the air goes still, that water rushes back down through hydroelectric turbines and covers the load. The mountain itself is the battery, with no chemistry and no lithium involved anywhere in the system, just gravity and a very large tank of water sitting up high.
The numbers are real and verifiable. The plant has covered the island's entire electricity demand for long stretches, including a record run of 24 consecutive days fully renewable in 2019, and it first reached 100 percent for a few hours back in August 2015. Across a single year it has cut more than 18,000 tonnes of CO2 and saved around 6,000 tonnes of diesel that used to be shipped in and set alight in the old plant. It is worth being honest about the limits, because the voice here never oversells. On calm, low-wind weeks the island still fires up its diesel backup, so the renewable share averages out across the year rather than running at 100 percent every single day. The achievement is the design and what it proves is possible, not a flawless score on the meter.
If you visit, the Gorona del Viento visitor centre near Valverde walks you through the whole loop in about an hour, and the drive up to the upper reservoir gives you the turbines, the crater and the open ocean all in a single view. It is the rare power station that genuinely works as a sightseeing stop, and it costs almost nothing to see.
OCEAN TOURS Tenerife
