Auction

Already postponed from June to September 30, the procurement will now be held by the end of October. The exercise will be open to new renewables projects with more than 5 MW of generation capacity. Selected developers will be awarded 15-year energy deals rather than the 12-year arrangements offered in February’s abortive attempt.

Although it is unclear how much generation capacity will be contracted, several projects submitted for the subsequently cancelled fourth government renewables auction may participate in Thursday’s procurement. ‘Qualified users’ – energy consumers needing more than 1 MW of power and without access to regulated power supply from national utility CFE – are expected to be among the buyers at the exercise.

Brazilian energy agency the EPE has pre-qualified 1,829 renewable power projects with a combined capacity of 100.8 GW for the procurement exercise. The A-6 auction is expected to be the largest in terms of allocated capacity and to deliver lower bids than previous rounds.

Only eight of the 93 companies which acquired the technical specifications for the tender have decided to participate in the procurement exercise. Collectively, the submitted project proposals had a combined capacity of 90 MW. Domestic content rules required the use of solar modules assembled in Algeria, as well as locally manufactured mounting structures and cables.

Three projects with generation capacities of 5.6-6 MW were pre qualified for a 5.6 MW capacity procurement and Finnish utility Fortum secured the only PV project selected. The capex figure offered by solar developers was lower than that for 71 MW of wind power allocated and lower than for previous PV projects.

Rodrigo Sauaia, CEO of Brazilian solar energy association ABSOLAR, analyzes the chances of PV in this year’s two energy auctions in which it can compete. But it is not all about auctions, Sauaia tells pv magazine, there are 2 GW of solar projects under development for which bilateral PPAs may be signed, and hundreds of MW worth of such schemes that have already secured contracts.

Projects with capacity 10-50 MW can compete for grid connection with a voltage of 15-60 kV. Projects applying for a connection with a higher voltage will have to have more than 50 MW of generation capacity.

The government of the Balkan country is tendering several PV projects with a total generation capacity of 25 MW in Sveti Nikole and another 10 MW in Makedonski Brod, all on public land. Another tender, for 27 MW of capacity on private land, will be launched in the coming weeks.

The Portuguese government plans to allocate over 2 GW of PV capacity through two procurement exercises to be held in June and January. Among the potential bidders — who Portugal’s state secretary for energy, João Galamba, expects to meet soon — there is a range of different Portuguese and foreign players of varying sizes.

The tender is on June 28. This year’s procurement exercise may allocate less capacity than previous auctions, due to lower demand for contracting new projects.