Triple what, exactly: a user's guide to reading a productivity figure

Buenaventura Gómez, Director of Energy Transition at ID Energy Group, wrapped up his talk in Madrid on 2 June with four figures. "We are currently able to develop, every year, 50 biomethane projects, 20 in biofertilisers, 20 electric charging stations for heavy vehicles and 3 pyrolysis plants. That is measured and verified." That makes 93 applications a year, a total we added up ourselves. Straight after it came the sentence that turns a brochure figure into one you can audit.

> "when I say develop, it is taking it, let's say, to the stage before [...] RTB. That is, putting together the whole project and submitting it to the competent environmental authority so that they are ready to obtain environmental authorisation."

Then the multiple. Today's portfolio is "exactly triple" the capacity "that we had a year ago with the same team". The team numbers 62.

You now have the four facts you will almost never be given. The numerator is applications submitted to the environmental authority. The period is one year. The denominator is a constant headcount of 62. The cut-off point is RTB, ready to build, the eve of construction. With those four you can argue with the figure, replicate it and ask for it again in twelve months. Without them, we've tripled efficiency is a claim nobody can check.

What counts as a submitted application

A submitted application is paperwork handed in at the counter, on time. It carries no environmental authorisation and not a single MW. The company does not yet have a single biomethane plant operating in Spain ("in Spain we only have developments"), and its first three go into construction at the end of 2026. Gómez drew the boundary himself: "Everything I'm going to tell you comes before the EPC, before construction." Once you know where a metric starts and stops, you can hold it up against the metric of whoever next boasts of having tripled something.

Three of the four business lines were new

The department used to handle biomethane and nothing else. It was renamed Energy Transition because it took on biofertilisers, charging stations and pyrolysis with the same resources.

Run the numbers, but note first that the arithmetic is ours, not his. If today's portfolio is 93 applications and that is "exactly triple" what it was a year ago, then it was 31. If those 31 were all biomethane, the like-for-like line has gone from 31 to 50 applications a year, a multiple of 1.6. The rest of the "triple" would then come from three activities that did not exist before. He does not give that breakdown. The sum reads another way too: if biofertilisers or charging stations were already in the portfolio a year ago, pure productivity carries more of the weight, and he does not say which reading is right. Widening the range and speeding up are different achievements, both of them good. One means you are entering more markets, the other that you are producing more in the same one.

The digital twin is not finished yet

The most ambitious piece is a digital twin that runs from site data to the environmental report, by way of land studies, permitting and conceptual engineering. "We haven't finished it, but when we have finished it [...] they will go from being content creators to supervisors," he said of the studies, conceptual engineering and permitting teams.

The other project is done. Someone used to have to go into the tracking database to pull out reports; now "it alerts us to deviations". That is where the "measured and verified" comes from: internal verification, with no third party involved.

The triple was achieved without the tool he presents as the big lever. Either the multiple comes from what already works, in which case it can be replicated today, or part of it is still prospective. As it stands, the figure does not let you tell which.

The studies that used to be outsourced

The only saving whose mechanism you can check is in the supply chain. "The permitting side used to subcontract noise studies, odour studies, hydrological studies, with time and a tool like the one we're using, we've managed to do it with our own resources." On the size of the saving he goes no further than "a not inconsiderable amount" per project, with no figure attached. And he admits as much twice: "This isn't easy to analyse, OK? This isn't easy to analyse."

Check the denominator here, because headcount did not take the strain. In his words, "no technician has been let go, the way they work has simply been changed".

Two licences or sixty-two people

He was not allowed onto the cloud, and the deal that finally won over IT was "just two open licences with certain restrictions", through which all the work runs. Earlier he had said that "everyone has Claude to ask questions" (he repeated the "everyone") and that "they use it regularly" after an initial period of free access.

The two statements could sit side by side, with two corporate licences for project work and general queries for everyone else, but that is our guess. He did not put it that way, and it is not for us to settle it for him. The difference goes straight to the denominator you care about. Ninety-three applications across 62 people describe a transformed organisation. Ninety-three across the two people the work runs through describe something else, just as interesting and easier to copy.

He owns up to a lot along the way. He binned his plan to train all 62 ("We realised it wasn't") and ruled out three tools before Claude. He does not boast about the choice: "I don't know if we got it right, but the tool we work with works very well for us."

Why you need the rule this year

AI agents for developing and running renewable assets are already in the big players' catalogues. Microsoft set out a three-layer multi-agent architecture in April, and AWS a proof of concept a month earlier. Most vendors will arrive at your desk with a multiplier; almost none will bring the denominator. Now compare a source that does publish it. PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer puts growth in jobs requiring AI skills at 69%, against 9% for the market as a whole, and the average wage premium at 62%. These are percentages you can argue with, because you know where they come from: more than a billion job postings in 27 countries.

Spanish biomethane will be the first to need that discipline. MITECO, Spain's Ministry for the Ecological Transition, has proposed minimum quotas for biomethane in gas sales, rising from 0.5% in 2028 to 6% in 2035. The preamble to that draft Royal Decree counts 23 plants operating at the start of 2026. You close that gap by putting applications together.

The new charge and the developer's cash flow

Asked about next year, he placed the problem outside his company. "Next year, we'll see, I don't know. We'll have to wait and see what the regulator does." The reason is cash flow. Royal Decree-Law 7/2026 of 20 March, in force since 22 March, creates a capacity reservation charge payable from the moment the access permit is obtained until the installation starts operating. It falls only on demand access permits, meaning consumption installations, at connection points of 1 kV or more. A biomethane development is caught through the electricity the plant itself consumes, not the gas it injects; heavy-vehicle charging stations are caught in full. And the money does not come back as cash. It is deducted from network access charges, capped at the access charges on each bill, and the deduction covers 100% of what was paid in the first year and 80% from the second year on. He puts it in a developer's terms: "even if they give it back to you later in operation, but it's an additional and significant CAPEX that we haven't planned for. And we development companies tend to have little cash."

Publish your denominator

The unit of measure ends up being money. We've tripled efficiency asks you to take it on faith. The full statement (93 applications a year, 62 people, up to RTB, four technologies) hands you something his bank and his industrial partner can verify and ask for again the following year. Naturgy and ID Energy Group agreed to develop at least 20 biomethane projects in Spain, worth more than €500 million and coming into operation between 2026 and 2028, with ID Energy Group as the minority partner. Deals like that are signed by counting applications one by one.

What you can copy from this case is the format of the statement: a numerator named in full, a period, a headcount denominator, a cut-off point in the process and the make-up of the portfolio. Publish it before your multiple, because the sector is going to compare multipliers blind, and whoever puts their denominator on the table first gets to set the yardstick.

ID Energy Group case study at RENMAD UsefulAI 2026, Madrid, 2 June 2026. With Buenaventura Gómez, Director of Energy Transition at ID Energy Group.