Profile #2 — TotalEnergies at Castejón: from rare peaker to base load

Second of the series “Profiles of the post-blackout club”. The first covered ContourGlobal at Arrubal — the most extreme case. Here we look at a nearby node (Navarra) with a very different owner profile.

ContourGlobal is a PE-owned operator with a single Spanish asset. TotalEnergies is something else: one of the five global energy supermajors, $196B revenue in 2024, ~105,000 employees, 130+ countries. In Spain it runs a growing electricity retail business, and exactly two combined-cycle gas turbines: Castejón 1 and Castejón 3, both in Navarra. Those are its only physical power-generation assets in Spain.

And it turns out Castejón is the second-biggest winner of the post-blackout reshuffle: +€95M post vs pre, ×5.8 ratio. As big as TotalEnergies is globally, in Spain its electricity-market exposure depends almost entirely on these two machines. The fact that both won simultaneously isn’t an accident — it’s the signature of the same locational thesis we saw at Arrubal.

The two Castejóns

The Castejón complex in Navarra has three turbo blocks sharing site and substation. But they don’t share owner:

• Castejón 1 (CTJON1): 400 MW, TotalEnergies
• Castejón 2 (CTJON2): 400 MW, Iberdrola — yes, Iberdrola, in the middle of the TotalEnergies complex
• Castejón 3 (CTJON3): 400 MW, TotalEnergies

Worth pausing here: same physical installation, three near-identical blocks, two owners. The post-blackout difference between the TotalEnergies blocks (1 and 3) and the Iberdrola one (2) has to come from something other than hardware or location. We’ll get to it at the end.

For this profile we focus on TotalEnergies’ two blocks — CTJON1 and CTJON3 — because they’re the ones the reshuffle rewards.

The trajectory: rare peaker → base load

The pre-blackout trajectory is textbook emergency peaker:

• CTJON3 typically dispatched 0.3-2.6 GWh/month at average prices of €500-900/MWh — these are scarcity calls, the system needs the unit on for a few hours but pays whatever the offer is. Some months with zero dispatch.
• CTJON1 slightly more active (1-15 GWh/month) at €170-400 prices, with a scale closer to a mid-merit unit than a pure peaker.

May 2025 changes everything:

• CTJON3: jumps to 40.6 GWh in May, sustains 27-42 GWh for the next 12 months, with 410-642 dispatch hours per month. This is no longer peaker — it’s base operating. And average price drops to €250/MWh (well below the €600+ prior).
• CTJON1: 9-25 GWh/month, 65-170 hours, €155-260 prices.

Combined post vs pre delta: +€95M pay-as-bid revenue, ×5.8 over pre-blackout base.

Same trajectory, three different owners

What validates the thesis isn’t just Castejón. It’s that the same curve appears in three plants with completely different owners in the same north-interior corridor:

• Arrubal (ContourGlobal, La Rioja): hibernation to 25-30 GWh/month
• Castejón (TotalEnergies, Navarra): rare peaker to 27-43 GWh/month
• Escatrón 3 (Repsol, Aragón): sporadic use to 20+ GWh/month

Three operators sharing no commercial strategy, ownership, or corporate culture. But sharing one geography: the Aragón-Navarra-La Rioja renewable corridor. And the switch calendar is essentially identical — April/May 2025. The hypothesis holds: REE didn’t choose TotalEnergies. It chose the geography. TotalEnergies is there by historical accident (inherited assets through several acquisitions in the Spanish market since 2019).

Why Castejón wins where others lose — and the CTJON2 case

The interesting wrinkle is that the middle block of the complex, CTJON2 from Iberdrola, doesn’t show the same step profile as CTJON1+3 from TotalEnergies. Same node, same physical site, same fuel. Why do TotalEnergies’ blocks win as a pair and Iberdrola’s stays flatter?

The likely answer is technical availability + offer strategy. CTJON2 may have been in major maintenance during part of the post-blackout period. Or Iberdrola, with a much larger fleet of its own (Arcos, Aceca, Escombreras 6, Tarragona Power, plus its own Castejón), prioritizes some plants over others depending on their operating costs and on the prices where it offers. TotalEnergies, with just 2 Spanish blocks, has a different incentive: offer aggressively to maintain continuous dispatch.

Without internal data we can’t close the CTJON2 case definitively. But the fact that three near-identical blocks exist with different owners and different behaviors confirms that the reshuffle isn’t owner-blind. Geography dictates who can play; how well you play is decided by the owner.

What’s next

So far Arrubal and Castejón follow the same pattern: hibernation or sporadic use pre-blackout → semi-continuous use post-blackout, stable prices, same corridor.

In the next post we look at Castleton at Amorebieta — a winner profile that breaks the pattern: pre-blackout it was already an active plant, not hibernating. What changed post-blackout isn’t an entry to base load, but operation at 100% capacity for 5 straight months. And it happened in Vizcaya, not the north-interior corridor.

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The data is open in ESIOS Data — ask about units, complexes, or corridors.