Central & South America

Fresh from the success of its 7.7 MW microgrid at Gold Fields’ Granny Smith mine in Western Australia, Aggreko has signed a 10-year contract with the global gold miner to install at 25.9 MW hybrid solar and thermal power solution at its Salares Norte mine site, located at a height of 4,500 meters in the Andes Mountains.

Falling module prices will help PV post another record year after an estimated 132 GW was installed worldwide in 2020, according to an energy transition investment trends report published by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The private-sector arm of the World Bank, which claims to leverage $3 of its own capital and $8 from third parties for every dollar invested in its blended finance funds, has attempted to quantify what devoting Covid recovery funds to green investment would mean for emerging economies.

Scientists in Spain and Colombia took a closer look at the degradation mechanisms affecting perovskite solar cells, and developed a new, high throughput method to characterize their performance in an outdoor setting. The group evaluated the method through outdoor testing on perovskite modules manufactured in a lab. it expects its findings to offer easier device characterization and better understanding of the degradation mechanisms affecting perovskite solar cells, both important factors in the technology’s development.

Puerto Rican regulators have ordered PREPA to procure solar and storage, but the utility’s board chairman says that the island’s grid can support only a fraction of the mandated amount.

Brazil may see the deployment of 4 GW of new distributed generation solar capacity this year and another 5 GW next year, according to Aldo Pereira Teixeira, the CEO of Brazil’s largest PV product distributor and system integrator. In an interview with pv magazine, he explains why and how this huge growth could materialize.

Portuguese utility EDP has agreed to buy a minority stake of up to 40% in Brazil’s Blue Sol Participações.

Brazil has installed around 3 GW of large-scale solar capacity, in addition to 4 GW in the distributed-generation PV segment.

A Brazilian research team has shown the advantages of linking solar-powered zero-energy buildings to recharging stations for electric vehicles. It proposed a model that can be applied to any location.

Spanish developer Grenergy has secured a PPA from Colombian energy company Celsia for the supply of 120 GWh per year. The electricity will be provided by a solar park that will begin commercial operations in 2022.