On Friday, SunPower, Total and Chilean energy officials celebrated the completion of the US$200 million, 70 MW PV Salvador project in Chiles Atacama Desert.
The project, which records show was synchronized to the grid late last year, is one of the worlds largest merchant solar power plants, according to SunPower and Total.
"As one of the world's largest operating solar merchant power plants, PV Salvador represents an important milestone for the electricity generation industry, proving that solar can provide wholesale power at competitive prices in completely unsubsidized markets," said Bernard Clement, senior vice president, Total New Energies, in a statement.
Equipped with more than 160,000 crystalline solar panels mounted on single-axis trackers, the plant is expected to generate around 200 GWh per year, or enough to supply approximately 70,000 Chilean households, according to Total.
SICs latest generation update also shows that Enels 55 MW Lalackama PV plant began generating electricity on Jan. 11. The $110 million project is located in northern Chile.
Regulator documents show approximately 265 MW of PV on line at the end of 2014, with more than 1.8 GW of additional PV plants scheduled to come into service this year, and more than 4 GW through 2017.
While some of these projects may be speculative, SunPowers and Enels new additions to Chiles grid shows that many projects are real.
IHS predicts that Chile will become the next emerging market to reach 1 GW of total installed PV capacity this year.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.