Chile

The solar manufacturer has landed its biggest engineering, procurement and construction services deal and will work on solar facilities in Europe and Latin America which will come online before 2023.

Around 30% of a 571 MW Chilean hybrid facility owned by Irish developer Mainstream Renewable Power has been built. The Condor solar power plant is part of the 1.3 GW Andes Renovables wind-solar complex.

The levelized cost of energy generated by large scale solar plants is around $0.068/kWh, compared to $0.378 ten years ago and the price fell 13.1% between 2018 and last year alone, according to figures released by the International Renewable Energy Agency.

Analysts at Bloomberg New Energy Finance say the lowest-cost projects financed in Australia, China, Chile and the UAE in the last six months hit a levelized cost of energy of just $23-29/MWh and the best solar and wind projects will produce electricity for less than $20/MWh by 2030.

Atamostec, a private-public initiative supported by Chile’s government-run Production Development Corp. and several industrial partners, has developed a new module. The team claims that the bifacial panel offers an additional annual average gain of 11% compared to monofacial PERC modules with the same cell technology.

The ten largest solar tracker companies accounted for 88% of the market last year, according to analyst WoodMackenzie, with the market growing 20% from 2018.

Grenergy was this week due to ship 400,000 face masks to Latin America as European developers today voiced a fear project finance will become increasingly difficult to find as the coronavirus lockdown continues.

Colbún has applied for approval to build a 788 MW solar project in Chile’s northern region of Antofagasta.

Batteries, and the raw materials that make them, are a frequent target of public criticism. The high water consumption required for lithium extraction is speeding up desertification around the salt lakes of Latin America’s “lithium triangle”, for example. The mining debate highlights general problems with the extraction of raw materials including copper, crude oil and lithium but international companies can still influence extraction methods – and there are plenty of different approaches.

The ‘deep photovoltaic nowcasting’ project developed by Chile’s Institute of Engineering Sciences of the University of O’Higgins, Canada’s Laval University and Japan’s Kyoto University, seeks to make short-term, high-resolution projections of solar energy generation.