ENAIRE's CEO, Enrique Maurer, presented to the company's Governing Board the new scope of the Green Sky programme, the Environmental Sustainability Plan that is part of the Company's Strategic Plan, the 2025 Flight Plan, and which has been renewed with even more ambitious measures for 2024 and 2025, with a greater commitment to contribute to more sustainable aviation in Spain.
Enrique Maurer explained to ENAIRE's Governing Board the five main themes of the Green Sky strategic initiative, which seek to account for the sector's total impact on the environment:
• Reduce atmospheric emissions (in parallel with reduced fuel consumption).
• Attenuate noise levels and reduce their effect on biodiversity in and around airports.
• Promote energy efficiency in ENAIRE's control centres and facilities.
• Improve environmental management, primarily through process optimisation, promoting environmental transparency as per international standards and enhancing environmental certifications.
• Reduce and monitor the environmental impact of projects through DNSH (do no significant harm) analyses and biodiversity studies.
ENAIRE's CEO said that, thanks to ENAIRE's commitment to help aviation to become increasingly sustainable, as part of the Strategic Plan, projects are underway to restructure airspace that led to a 2% growth in traffic managed in 2023 compared to 2019, resulting in the flight efficiency of the Spanish route network being 96.7%, an improvement over the value from 2019 (the previous record traffic year in Spain).
Thus, even though 2023 was a record year for ENAIRE, with over 2.2 million flights managed, thanks to the measures adopted, over 2 million nautical miles were avoided, equivalent to 3.8 million kilometres (almost 94 trips around the Earth), preventing the atmospheric emission of almost 70,000 tonnes of CO2 and saving airlines over 22,000 tonnes of fuel compared to 2019.
The course of action for 2024 and 2025 will allow us to take a decisive step forward in the measures implemented successfully in 2023 to achieve greater fuel savings and lower CO2 emissions, while making progress in ENAIRE's environmental responsibility and excellence.
More continuous descent procedures
As part of this initiative, so crucial due to its contribution to saving fuel and improved environmental efficiency, the CEO of ENAIRE emphasised "the efforts being made by air traffic control units managed by ENAIRE to facilitate continuous descent procedures during approaches to major airports, more efficient procedures in terms of environmental sustainability".
The data reveal ENAIRE as the leading air navigation service provider in continuous descents: on average in 2023, ENAIRE cleared 36% of all operations to do a continuous descent at major airports, compared to the 13% average at the leading European airports over the same period.
In terms of the actions to reduce noise pollution, ENAIRE, as part of its commitment to make airport operations compatible with the acoustic quality of airport environments, collaborates closely with the Civil Aviation General Directorate and AENA to reduce noise pollution in cities and towns by optimising flight procedures.
100% renewable electricity supply
In the same vein, ENAIRE will continue to purchase 100% of its electricity from certified renewable sources, a measure that, since 2015, has saved over 110,000 tonnes of CO2. There is also, as the CEO explained to the Governing Board, a plan to install solar panels to supply electricity and foster the use of renewable energies.
“In fact, photovoltaic installations are already operational at ENAIRE's air control centres in Seville and the Canary Islands. The Madrid Control Centre will open its own installation this year, and the one in the Barcelona Control Centre will go into operation in 2025", noted Maurer.
It is important to note that ENAIRE generated nearly 2.5 GWh in 2023, and expects to reach 4 GWh once the installations planned for 2025 are active. These figures represent a saving of 18% of the electricity consumed in these units, and 13.7% of ENAIRE's total consumption. Spain's national air navigation service provider is also a founding member of the Alliance for Air Transport Sustainability, which was created in April of last year. The Alliance encompasses a total of 900 companies and entities in the sector whose aim and commitment is to combine efforts in order to decarbonise the aviation sector.
