Dominican Republic

The National Energy Commission of the Dominican Republic (CNE) has announced the granting of the definitive concession to three photovoltaic projects totaling 148 MW.

The latest set of clean energy statistics compiled by the International Renewable Energy Agency signal a changing of the guard when it comes to clean power, with legacy hydropower facilities overtaken by new intermittent renewables.

Big clean energy supply contracts have been announced in Brazil, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.

Ukraine’s favorite solar module manufacturer has posted another encouraging set of returns, after a difficult year in 2018. And Risen – which boasted 6.6 GW of annual production capacity at the end of last year, according to analysts at PV InfoLink – is committed to adding another 2.5 GW before 2022.

The islands of the Caribbean have been focusing on the deployment of storage solutions, minigrids and microgrids in response to the damage their power systems suffered during the 2017 hurricane season. But with the opportunities, there are also challenges.

In the early years of the 21st century, distributed generation systems in Latin America were mainly installed off-grid in remote rural areas, writes Maria Chea, solar analyst at IHS Markit. As the El Niño phenomenon and high oil prices continued to exacerbate high electricity prices and power shortages, governments began to turn their attention to distributed generation, including PV systems, to assuage strains on their national grid networks.

With a capacity of 58 MW, the Caribbean’s largest PV plant has been commissioned in the Dominican Republic. The site was developed, planned and built by German EPC, F&S Solar. It now aims to ramp the project up to 119 MW by next year.

The project is part of the three large-scale solar plants that the Dominican government is planning to bring online in 2018.

AES Dominicana’s 20 MW storage system helped maintain the power grid operational during the passage of Hurricanes Irma and Maria.

The three large-scale PV projects are being developed in the frame of the national plan for the development of renewable energies.