APREN's 2025 Wind Audit Tallies 25.4% Consumption Share But Flags PNEC 10.4 GW Onshore Target as Off-Pace — Pedro Amaral Jorge Eyes 2031-2032 Slippage

Wind power covered 25.4% of Portugal's electricity consumption in 2025, according to the joint annual audit published on 15 June 2026 by APREN (Associação Portuguesa de Energias Renováveis — the Portuguese Renewable Energies Association) and INEGI (Instituto de Ciência e Inovação em Engenharia Mecânica e Engenharia Industrial — the Institute of Science and Innovation in Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Engineering). The 25.4% reading is the highest annual share on record for the technology, but the report's central finding is that the trajectory is no longer compatible with the 2030 milestones written into the Plano Nacional Energia e Clima (National Energy and Climate Plan, PNEC).

The revised PNEC sets out two binding numbers for the end of 2030: 10.4 GW of installed onshore wind capacity and 2 GW of installed offshore wind capacity. APREN reports that capacity additions in 2025 again fell short of the linear glide path implied by those targets, with most of the year's net additions coming from sobreequipamento (overequipment — adding modern turbines to existing licensed sites) rather than greenfield projects, and from repowering of ageing parks where the planning consent already existed.

APREN president Pedro Amaral Jorge, quoted in the report's executive summary, said the gap is now too wide to close on the official timeline. "Estamos muito atrasados na implementação das metas desde 2019" (we are very behind on implementing the targets since 2019), he said, projecting that the onshore 10.4 GW figure is more likely to be reached in 2031 or 2032 than at the end of 2030. Amaral Jorge also reiterated that the natural quality of Portuguese wind regimes is "uma clara vantagem competitiva" (a clear competitive advantage), particularly in zones where the Rede Eléctrica Nacional (REN — National Electricity Grid) transmission backbone has spare capacity, but only if the planning, licensing and grid-connection chain is overhauled.

The offshore side of the file is where the slippage is most acute. The first commercial-scale Portuguese offshore tender has yet to launch, and the report's authors note that the construction lead time for the floating-foundation technologies expected to populate the Viana do Castelo and Figueira da Foz allocation areas is between four and six years from final investment decision. Even if the Direção-Geral de Energia e Geologia (DGEG — Directorate-General for Energy and Geology) opens a tender during 2026, the 2 GW offshore target is now considered a 2032-or-later proposition by most of the industry submissions referenced by APREN.

For investors and grid planners the report sharpens a series of policy choices already on the desk of the Ministério do Ambiente e Energia (Ministry of Environment and Energy). One is whether to repackage the offshore tender, originally designed as a fixed-price contract-for-difference, around a Contract-for-Difference-plus-merchant hybrid that is more attractive to floating-wind developers. A second is whether to bring forward the next overequipment regime so that existing parks can pre-empt the 2030 inventory gap. A third — and the one most visible to electricity bill-payers — is how much of any near-term shortfall is covered by extending the depreciated combined-cycle gas fleet at Tapada do Outeiro and Lares, with the cost passed through the Tarifa de Acesso às Redes (Network Access Tariff).

The 25.4% number, in short, is a milestone the wind industry will use to claim policy victory; the rest of the APREN-INEGI report is the supporting case that the next milestone is already at risk.