Foresight secures 10-year solar PPA from ArcelorMittal in Spain

The Foresight Solar Fund has secured another 10-year, fixed-rate PPA in Spain. The U.K. private equity firm said the deal relates to two 5 MW PV plants near Toledo, in the central part of the country.

The Escalonilla Norte y Escalonilla Sur solar facilities, which are connected to the grid, will become operational in the second quarter of this year. They will provide power at an undisclosed price to Luxembourg-based energy company ArcelorMittal Energy S.C.A., which is a unit of French multinational steel manufacturer ArcelorMittal.

“The execution of our third 10-year PPA in the region is further proof of a robust future for the Iberian unsubsidized market,” said Carlos Rey, director of Foresight.

The company opened its Spanish office in Madrid in October. On the Iberian Peninsula, it has a pipeline of unsubsidized PV projects with a combined capacity of 119 MW, it said in an online statement.

Foresight announced its first PPA for a solar project in Spain, and the country’s first deal of this kind, in December 2017. The 3.9 MW solar plant it constructed in the municipality of Las Torres de Cotillas, in southeastern Spain’s Murcia region, is now selling electricity under a 10-year PPA to Spanish power provider Energya-VM, a unit of Spanish industrial conglomerate Grupo Villar Mir.

Over the past year, developers have signed several similar PPAs across Spain and Portugal. According to Spanish solar energy association UNEF, PPAs in the large-scale PV segment have reached more than 2 GW to date. The largest deal was made by Spanish renewable energy company Audax Renovables, which in February inked a 20-year PPA for a 708 MW portfolio of plants to be developed in Spain and Portugal by WElink.

In March 2018, Spanish renewable energy developer, Cox Energy, secured a long-term PPA for 660 MW of solar from Spanish power distributor Audax. Later in the year, Spanish developer X-Elio secured a 14-year PPA for two 50 MW solar projects in the Murcia region. More recently, Iberdrola bagged a long-term PPA for its 391 MW Planta Solar Núñez de Balboa project from Spanish and Basque country-based telecoms company Euskate.