Customize the use of cookies

This website uses cookies to provide more efficient navigation and analyze visitor traffic. You will find detailed information about them below.

Cookies classified as "Necessary" will be stored in your browser, as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. We also use third-party cookies aimed at analytics (Google Analytics), which help us analyze how you use this website. You can choose to enable or disable some of these cookies, but doing so may affect your browsing experience.

Always Active

These cookies are required to provide basic functionality of the website and cannot be disabled. They do not store any private or personally identifiable data.

These cookies allow us to understand how visitors interact with the website and provide information related to the number of visits, traffic sources, and bounce rates.

The León City Council and the company Aguas de León, members of the NEXUS project consortium, have presented to the capital of León this innovative initiative, coordinated by the CARTIF Technology Centre and financed by the European LIFE program, which aims to promote the sustainability of the cycle urban water by demonstrating the use of small-scale hydroelectric power plants to recover unused energy in existing water distribution networks.

The LIFE NEXUS project, with an initial budget of 1,158,000 euros and subsidized by the European Commission by 60%, will take advantage of the electricity dissipated in the Porma drinking water treatment station and it is expected that this pioneering hydraulic prototype will be extended to 30 European cities in the future. The Councilor for Urbanism and Environment of León, Ana Franco, and the manager of Aguas de León, Manuel Salas Palenzuela, have offered a press conference explaining the details of what will be a major step in environmental policy for the city.

The ultimate goal of the project is to achieve “an environmental saving that promotes the circular economy”, according to Ana Franco. “We seek to accumulate enough surplus and when there is more need for energy not have a deficit,” she has added. Additionally, Salas Palenzuela has pointed out that they provide “an economic savings of about 10,000 or 12,000 euros a year in energy that will be completely self-consumed”.

The project partners are working since last October on the design of the prototype and it is expected that at the end of the year it will be installed in the aforementioned hydraulic station. The equipment to be installed will have an average power of 25 kW and “will generate an energy of 215 MWh / year of renewable electricity, achieving a reduction of the carbon footprint of 140 tons of CO2 every year”, Councilor Franco has clarified.

The consortium of companies is led by CARTIF and completed by AQUATEC, the Lithuanian company ASU, the Polish IMP-PAN and the aforementioned Aguas de León, which work to achieve savings and optimization of resources and which has already put its seed in the capital of León.