The General Directorate of Water of the Ministry of Ecological Transition has proposed to award the technical development works of the future National Hydraulic Energy Storage Program (PNAHE) to a temporary union of companies (UTE) constituted by Typsa engineering. In 2024, this company hired as director the first General Director of Water of Teresa Ribera in this department, Manuel Menéndez Prieto.
The contract, with an estimated value of 2.44 million euros, will be awarded for 1.7 million euros to the joint venture formed by Typsa and Jesús Granell Ingeniero Consultor SL, according to the minutes of the ministry’s procurement table which has just been published on the state procurement platform. This organization unanimously agreed to entrust the work to this SEI after having obtained “the highest score for being the most advantageous offer for the Administration”.
The Typsa UTE offer was the third most expensive of those presented (1,773,463.18 euros), but it obtained the best qualitative score, with 86 points out of 100, in a call for tenders in which the technical offer had a weight of 48% in the final score and which was launched through an open procedure.
The alliance of these two companies prevailed over the proposals of the UTEs formed by Qanat Engineering SL and Mega Engineering (second ranked) and Intecsa Engineering Group SAU and Tecopy, among others.
Menéndez has been a director of Typsa since July 2024, according to the commercial register. A civil servant with the State Corps of Civil Engineers, the former water director has a career spanning more than thirty years in the public sector. He headed this General Directorate from June 2018 to January 2020. After his resignation from his management position, he remained at the ministry as an advisory member to the Secretary of State for the Environment, Hugo Morán.
From there he joined Typsa in 2024, which in 2020 signed the former Minister of Development and former popular mayor of Santander, Íñigo de la Serna, whom he appointed vice president in May 2024. This position at Typsa was previously held by another former PP politician, Carlos del Álamo, Minister of the Environment under Manuel Fraga Xunta from 1997 to 2003 and who also signed at the time for the paper company Ence with some controversy, due to that company’s close ties to Galicia.
Retired diplomat Francisco Javier Elorza, Secretary General of the European Communities with Felipe González or Secretary General of Consular Affairs and Immigration with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is also an advisor to Typsa.
A few months before signing him as advisor, in October 2023, Typsa asked Menéndez Prieto, while he was still advisor to the ministry, to give a lecture at its headquarters in San Sebastián de los Reyes (Madrid) on “The path of society in the 21st century”, as part of its lecture series. Among others, in recent years, the former governor of the Bank of Spain and current director general of the Bank for International Settlements, Pablo Hernández de Cos, the former socialist minister Jordi Sevilla, the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, and the economist Ramón Tamames have been there.
Pioneer of internationalization
Typsa, a pioneer in the internationalization of Spanish engineering (the domestic market represented only 22% of its turnover in 2024), has been singled out in the past by NGOs such as Ecologists in Action for its activities in Israel. In 2024, it achieved a turnover of around 396 million euros, according to its latest accounts, available in Insight View. A regular company of public administrations, it has already been responsible for monitoring more than 50 public dams of the Ebro Hydrographic Confederation.
The PNAHE, for which this UTE will carry out the technical work, is a flagship program of the General Directorate of Water. It aims to achieve the hydraulic storage targets envisaged by the National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan (PNIEC), with an additional 3.5 gigawatts (GW) of pumping in 2030. This technology is essential to enable energy storage, enable the continued deployment of renewable energy and reduce so-called discharges (energy wasted at specific times because supply exceeds demand).
Typsa and its partner will be in charge of drafting the strategic environmental document for the program, the studies prior to holding the new electricity competitions or even a report on the compatibility of the projects with the Hydrological Plans in force.
The specifications indicated that “it is necessary to have a specialized human team with such dedication that it exceeds the human and material resources currently existing at the General Directorate of Water, being therefore necessary to resort to hiring external support to achieve this”.
The document adds that “the technical potential of the program is very relevant. 29 pure pumping projects were selected, with an estimated energy storage capacity of 77.6 GWh and a daily regulation power of almost 9 GW.”
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