Our foundation: acciona.org

Originally under the name of ACCIONA Microenergía Foundation, the foundation was created with the aim of channelling ACCIONA's social action into access to basic services in developing countries. As a corporate foundation, our activity focuses on the company’s strategic lines, promoting the to basic energy, water & sanitation  services and infrastructures. 

The Luz en Casa programme was launched in Cajamarca, the department with the highest rates of poverty and lack of electricity in Peru. Five years later the programme achieved its breakeven point and, thus, its objective of demonstrating that it is viable, sustainable and affordable to bring quality basic electricity services, through solar home systems and a pay-for-service model, to low-income households in isolated and dispersed rural communities. Since 2017, Luz en Casa is also developed in Loreto, in the Peruvian Amazonia, having been adapted to the cutting-edge technology and the singular area of implementation.

The Luz en Casa Oaxaca programme was brought to Mexico, in partnership with the Government of Oaxaca, AECID –the Spanish Agency for Development– and its counterpart AMEXCID, with the aim of improving the living conditions of rural households living in poverty and extreme poverty by supplying third-generation home photovoltaic systems to provide them with basic electricity services. Today, this initiative is expanded with the EncASa Oaxaca programme to also offer access to safe drinking water, appropriate sanitation and improved cookstoves through systems the users choose in a catalogue of eco technologies.

A project for providing access to energy in refugee camps in Shire (Ethiopia) was launched, in partnership with AECID, the Technical University of Madrid, other Spanish companies and the collaboration of UNHCR, in which acciona.org analysed the feasibility of generating biogas for cooking. This initiative continues with the “Alianza Shire. Access to energy for refugees and host communities” project, cofunded by the European Union, in which acciona.org develops the off-grid component with access to electricity through solar home systems and promotion of micro businesses to give related services.

Luz en Casa is adapted to the Ngäbe-Buglé indigenous region, which has the lowest rate of development in Panama. The Luz en Casa Ngäbe-Buglé programme –implemented in public-private partnership for development with AECID– implies an intense work with national, regional, local and indigenous authorities, as well as being coordinated with the Rural Electrification Bureau in the country. All these with the aim of providing the most remote and underserved households with access to the electricity basic service, which alleviates their condition of poverty through economic savings and time for productive, educative, domestic or recreational activities.

The foundation’s first Chilean initiative will be developed in the country’s Coquimbo region, where currently almost 3,000 homes have no connection to the electricity grid. 

This pilot project consists of providing electricity to 50 households that depend on gasoline-powered generators as a source of energy, which provide them with a maximum of 3-5 hours of electricity per day, at a monthly cost that can amount to almost half of their income. acciona.org will replace these fossil fuel engines with safer, more efficient and environmentally sustainable home photovoltaic systems.

acciona.org begins its work in the Philippines with the "Lights at Home El Nido" project, which consists of the installation of residential photovoltaic systems in 100 homes in the town of El Nido, in the province of Palawan.

These systems will provide more than eight hours of renewable electricity a day to families who until now had no hope of connecting their homes to the conventional electric grid. Furthermore, this will also give them access to other essential services such as charging cell phones or computers and using electronic devices.