Arona currently produces around 22 million tons of bananas per year, a non-negligible amount that places this municipality in the top ten in the sector. At least in Tenerife.
This figure is possible thanks to the 366 hectares of agricultural land that are located on the coastal strip between Guaza and Las Galletas. The vast majority is irrigated with desalinated water, which was, in itself, a great advance at the time.
This water comes from an infrastructure that was inaugurated in 2006 with an investment of 5.2 million euros, coming from the owners, the so-called Irrigation Community, and the Tenerife Cabildo, which provided 25% of the necessary funds. for the desalination plant. It was a revolution to maintain agricultural production, jobs and the landscape of an area that, over the decades, has focused on the tourism sector.
Water for a city of 40,000 inhabitants
In 2018, it also reached a desalination capacity of 4,800 cubic meters per day. “To give us an idea, we are desalinating the equivalent of the water consumed by a city of 40,000 inhabitants,” explains the president of the Irrigators’ Community, Dionisio Rocha, himself one of the producers. The feat of being an agricultural power maintaining crops, in addition to being one of the leaders in the tourism sector, has an energy, economic and, of course, cost in terms of sustainability. The desalination plant, like everything, has a carbon footprint that it now aims to reduce drastically with the introduction of a project that will be possible thanks to the contribution of the owners and the well-known Next Generation funds.
This same week, the Governing Council of the community has given approval to the sustainability project that the management had presented and which already had the permission of the General Assembly, the body of which the partners who, when it was established, were part of more than a hundred.
Installation of solar panels
“We are betting on a project that will not only reduce our operating costs – explains Rocha – but will also reduce current energy consumption by 50% thanks to the installation of photovoltaic panels and batteries, which are what will provide the electricity captured by the plates.”
With energy through the roof and reaping historically high prices, the commitment to solar energy will allow the desalination plant to gain independence and be able to continue producing water at affordable prices, at a time when the fall in banana prices has reduced their profitability and the margin that producers obtain.
Currently, the plant uses five million kilowatts of conventional electricity from the grid per year, a figure that will be reduced by about three million kilowatts. More than 50%, according to Dionisio Rocha’s calculations.
The investment to make this possible will be, in total, 3.4 million euros. Of these, 1,452,000 come from aid that has been granted by the IDAE, which is the Institute for Energy Diversification and Saving, dependent on the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, with EU funds.
