The Legacy We Will Become

Spain did not abandon coal slowly. It did so abruptly, almost without ceremony. In a country where thermal power plants had stood for decades as immovable landmarks—visible from kilometers away, anchoring valleys and towns—the shutdown arrived not as a distant horizon but as an immediate fact within what is now understood as the coal phase-out Spain. From 2020 onward, chimneys went dark, turbines stopped spinning, and entire facilities were sealed in silence. What followed was not simply the end of an energy source, but the collapse of an industrial era that had shaped territories, economies, and identities within the broader energy transition Spain.

For much of the twentieth century, coal was more than fuel in Spain. It was structure. It organized work, justified infrastructure, and sustained populations in regions otherwise disconnected from the country's main economic centers. Mining basins and coal-fired power plants formed a dense industrial network, particularly in the north and interior of the peninsula. Towns grew around shafts, conveyor belts, cooling towers. Lives were measured in shifts, seasons, and production cycles. Coal provided stability in exchange for sacrifice, risk, and environmental degradation that was often accepted as inevitable. It became part of a collective memory deeply rooted in each territory.

This system endured through political transitions and economic cycles. Under Franco's regime, coal and thermal power plants were essential to an autarkic energy strategy. Later, during Spain's integration into the European market, they continued to function as reliable baseload generation. But by the early twenty-first century, the model had become increasingly untenable. Aging infrastructure, mounting environmental costs, and the tightening of European climate regulations placed coal at the center of a growing contradiction between industrial legacy and climate urgency.

The decisive break came at the end of the 2010s. European Union directives on emissions, combined with the rising cost of carbon allowances and the financial burden of adapting old plants to new pollution controls, pushed operators to shut down facilities rather than modernize them. In a short span of time, Spain closed nearly all of its coal-fired power plants. The speed of the process surprised even those who had anticipated the end of coal. Entire regions woke up to a future that had arrived before they were ready, accelerating the energy transition Spain within the wider renewable energy transition Europe.

The closures were presented, correctly, as a climate milestone. Spain dramatically reduced its coal-based electricity generation, accelerating its alignment with European decarbonization goals. But behind the national statistics lay a more fragmented reality. For communities built around thermal plants, the shutdown was not an abstract environmental victory. It was the loss of a social and economic axis that had structured daily life for generations. A rupture in memory, in territory, and in the lived experience of the transition.

In places like Asturias, León, Teruel, or parts of Andalusia, coal plants had been employers, symbols, and guarantees. Their presence justified roads, schools, and public services. Their absence created a vacuum that could not be filled overnight. While transition plans promised retraining programs and new investment, the lived experience of many communities was one of uncertainty, displacement, and an abrupt rupture with the past. The legacy of coal remains embedded in these territories.

At the same time, Spain was moving rapidly in the opposite direction. While coal disappeared, renewable energy expanded at unprecedented speed. Wind turbines spread across plateaus and mountain ridges. Solar photovoltaic fields multiplied across southern and central regions, transforming agricultural and semi-arid landscapes into new energy territories. In little more than a decade, renewables shifted from the margins to the core of Spain's electricity system, reinforcing its role within the renewable energy transition Europe.

This transformation was not accidental. Spain's geography—abundant sun, favorable wind corridors—combined with falling technology costs and European policy frameworks to create ideal conditions for renewable expansion. By the early 2020s, wind and solar power accounted for a substantial share of national electricity generation. In recent years, renewable sources have consistently produced more than half of the country's electricity, placing Spain among Europe's leaders in clean energy production and consolidating its position in the energy transition Spain.

From a macro perspective, the transition appears successful. Carbon emissions from electricity generation dropped sharply. Energy dependence on imported fossil fuels decreased. Spain positioned itself as a key player in Europe's green transition. But The Legacy We Will Become approaches this process not from balance sheets or policy documents, but from the ground—from the territories where this transformation is physically and socially inscribed.

The project documents the coexistence of endings and beginnings. Decommissioned coal plants, stripped of function yet still monumental, stand as relics of an industrial legacy that refuses to disappear quietly. Their vast interiors—control rooms, turbine halls, cooling systems—remain intact, frozen in time, bearing witness to a labor history that is still recent enough to be personal. These spaces are not ruins in the romantic sense; they are unresolved structures where memory persists.

Nearby, often within the same regions, new energy infrastructures rise. Wind farms dominate horizons once defined by smokestacks. Solar parks extend over land that previously held little strategic value. High-voltage lines connect remote production sites to distant consumption centers. The landscape becomes a palimpsest, layered with infrastructures that reflect different energy eras coexisting uneasily in the present. The territory becomes the physical expression of this transition.

This spatial overlap reveals the true complexity of the transition. Renewable energy is not simply replacing fossil fuels; it is reorganizing territory. Land use patterns change. Visual horizons are redrawn. New forms of extraction—this time of wind and sun—emerge, bringing their own conflicts and negotiations. In some communities, renewables are welcomed as opportunities for development and diversification. In others, they are perceived as imposed solutions, decided elsewhere, benefiting external actors more than local populations.

The concept of a "just transition" was introduced precisely to address these tensions. Spanish authorities, in line with European frameworks, negotiated agreements aimed at mitigating social impact in coal-dependent regions. These plans included economic diversification, support for new industries, environmental restoration, and retraining programs for displaced workers. On paper, they represented an acknowledgment that decarbonization is not only a technical challenge, but a social one within the renewable energy transition Europe.

In practice, the results are uneven. Some territories have managed to attract investment and reinvent parts of their economic base. Others remain suspended between promises and realities. Retraining does not always lead to stable employment. New projects often fail to absorb the labor force left behind by coal. Younger generations continue to migrate, accelerating demographic decline in already fragile regions. The transition exposes structural limits.

The Legacy We Will Become does not offer a verdict on the success or failure of these policies. Instead, it records their imprint on the ground. It follows workers closing the final doors of power plants where they spent their lives. It observes towns recalibrating their identity after the loss of their industrial core. It documents landscapes where the symbols of carbon-intensive growth coexist with the infrastructure of a decarbonized future, where legacy, memory, and territory intersect.

Spain's experience unfolds within a broader European context. While the country moved quickly away from coal, others remain more dependent on it. Germany, despite its renewable leadership, has faced prolonged debates over coal phaseout. Poland continues to rely heavily on coal as a domestic resource. Spain's rapid exit positions it as both a model and an outlier within the coal phase-out Spain and the wider renewable energy transition Europe.

This dual status carries implications. On one hand, Spain demonstrates that accelerated decarbonization is possible within a large, industrialized economy. On the other, it reveals the social costs of moving faster than the systems designed to absorb change. The Spanish case underscores a central tension of the European Green Deal: the gap between climate ambition and territorial resilience.

Renewable energy, often framed as an unequivocal good, becomes more ambiguous when observed up close. Large-scale solar and wind projects require land, capital, and grid infrastructure. They alter ecosystems and landscapes. They raise questions about ownership, governance, and distribution of benefits. In regions already marked by depopulation and economic vulnerability, the arrival of renewables can reproduce extractive dynamics under a different name.

This does not negate their necessity. Climate urgency leaves little room for delay. But it demands a more nuanced understanding of what decarbonization entails when translated into lived reality. The Legacy We Will Become insists on this nuance. It refuses both nostalgia for coal and uncritical celebration of renewables. It situates the transition as a process of loss and reconfiguration.

Visually, the project aligns with this perspective. The images do not aestheticize decay nor glorify new infrastructure. They observe. They allow spaces to speak through their scale, their emptiness, their transformation. Human presence appears not as anecdote, but as measure—bodies moving through structures that outlast individual lives, gestures that connect memory and future.

The essay form allows the project to extend beyond documentation into reflection. What does it mean to dismantle an industry that defined collective identity? How do societies process the end of a model that once represented progress? What kinds of futures are imagined—and imposed—in the name of sustainability? These questions resonate beyond Spain, across the energy transition Spain and the wider renewable energy transition Europe.

At its core, The Legacy We Will Become is concerned with time. Coal represents deep time—geological processes compressed into industrial use. Renewables represent cyclical time—wind, sun, flows that renew themselves. The transition between these systems is also a transition between temporal imaginaries. One is finite and extractive; the other promises continuity but requires constant management and adaptation.

The title of the project reflects this temporal tension. Legacy is often understood as something left behind, a residue of the past. Here, it is framed as something actively constructed in the present. The energy systems societies choose today will shape not only environmental outcomes, but social structures, territorial organization, and cultural memory. The legacy is not what coal was, nor simply what renewables will be, but how the transition itself is lived and remembered.

Spain stands at a threshold. Its coal era is over. Its renewable future is underway but not yet settled. Between these two states lies a landscape of unfinished narratives, where dismantled infrastructures coexist with emerging ones, and where communities negotiate their place in a rapidly changing energy order. The Legacy We Will Become captures this in-between moment.

As Europe advances toward climate neutrality, the Spanish case offers a mirror. It reflects both the promise of transformation and the cost of speed. It reminds us that decarbonization is not a single event, but a prolonged process of restructuring that extends far beyond energy production. It reshapes how societies inhabit territory, value labor, and imagine progress.

This project does not claim to resolve these tensions. Its ambition is to bear witness. To document a transformation as it unfolds. To hold space for complexity. And to ask what kind of legacy is being formed in the passage from one energy era to another.

Because in the end, the transition is not only about reducing emissions or meeting deadlines. It is about the kind of societies Europe chooses to become. And that choice—visible in landscapes, infrastructures, and lives—is already being written.