The Department of Environment, Agriculture and Rural Development of the Spanish region of Castilla La-Mancha has released an environmental permit for a 49 MW solar power project that Spain-based natural gas and power provider Gas Natural Fenosa is planning to build near Ciudad Real.
According to the region’s official journal, the PV plant will be owned by the special purpose company Planta solar fotovoltaica La Nava and will be located in the municipality of Almodóvar del Campo.
The installation, which will require a surface of approximately 118 hectares and the construction of a 3.7 Km electricity evacuation line as well as of a substation in its area, will be installed with 155,520 PV modules with an output of 315 W, 1,728 horizontal solar trackers and 15 central inverters.
Natural Gas Fenosa has recently entered the solar energy business with investments in Chile and Brazil. In Chile, its subsidiary Global Power Generation (GPG) has won the contract to build a 120 MW solar facility in the power auction held last year, while in Brazil the Spanish company is planning to build the Sobral I and Sertao I. These two 30 MW plants are planned to be built in the state of Piaui, in the north-eastern part of the counry. Both projects were selected in the second auction held in 2015.
In Spain’s latest auction for wind and solar projects, which was held in May, Natural Gas Fenosa was awarded 667 MW of wind power projects. In the auction, which was theoretically open to large-scale PV projects, only 1.5 MW of solar was allocated, while wind power had the remaining 2,998.5 MW.
Meanwhile, Reuters has recently reported rumors that the company could merge with Portuguese utility EDP, although both companies have already denied that talks over this operation are currently taking place.
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It’s progress in Spain that the established energy companies, that many observers think were largely responsible for sabotaging renewables for years, are now leading the timid recovery. It is still too much to hope that competition from distributed solar will be tolerated. Aldi is putting solar panels on its stores in cloudy England, not in sunny Spain.