Julio feels the current transition leaves behind rural communities in the peripheries and only prioritises the industrial and urban centres and their ever increasing hunger for energy. We met the collective of SOS Montes Torozos in La Mudarra, a village next two a huge substation with the same name. Substations are central nodes for the energy transition. Their location and connectivity to the grid has a huge impact on where power generators, powering hydrogen production, are built. And these nodes already exist based on the old energy system of fossil energy, hydro- and nuclear power. Thus, hydrogen production infrastructure uses the existing network, reinforcing spatial patterns of injustice, leaving behind rural areas.

We met Paco in port of Xixón. Here, two pipelines of the network meet, a hydrogen storage is planned and an LNG-terminal for shipping gas exists. Paco from Ecoloxistes n’Aición d’Asturies criticises the oversized infrastructure for gas export here and all over the Iberian Peninsula. While locally produced hydrogen can be useful way to power heavy industries, the current development is pointing in the very opposite direction. This system does not rely on "hydrogen that is produced and used locally, close to where it is needed", it "mainly benefits major energy corporations, which are interested above all in expanding their own infrastructure networks", Paco says.

enaro is one of the few young people who returned to his village in "España vaciada" (emptied Spain). After leaving his place to study in bigger cities, he now works with his home soils to grow food, produce some wine and keep the rural style of living alive. But a fossil gas pipeline already passes right below his village and the H2Med might follow soon. And with it plans to industrially produce natural gas and hydrogen in places where he now produces food for industries thousands of kilometers away. Listen to his emotional testimony and how he organises against biogas in the province of Zamora!

What kind of energy transition do we want? We want an energy transition that is more social, fairer and more in line with people's needs. Or do we really want a transition that is based on large companies' interests their desires and their needs, which aren't ours at all?
'The solutions we see are energy communities. But right now, much of our work is about defending territory, because there are so many projects we need to stop. It is frustrating that so much of our energy in activism goes into resisting these developments, when we could actually be building the futures we want. That creates a lot of anger. But at the same time, I still think there is hope.'

Along the pipeline, communities resist processes of energy colonialism. They don't want to be a self-service store for Northern Europe, they don't want a pipeline labelled as green while most of what runs through it, is either fossil fuels or serving a system relying on fossils. They are in favor of a transition towards renewable energy sources. But they demand that this transition keeps in mind the needs of rural populations and is not only governed by the fossil industry to keep up a business model that ruins people and planet.