Argentina, one of the underperformers in Latin America’s quickly rising solar energy industry so far, could get a 20MW PV plant built on government land.
The official government news portal of the Neuquén province said on Monday that plans to build the facility will be put forward to the National Secretariat for Energy for approval. The Antu Newen I plant will be located in Neuquén’s Chos Malal district.
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North Neuquén apparently has good solar irradiance levels for PV, the report by Neuquén Informa said, with Argentina’s national wholesale electricity market operator, CAMMESA, expected to be the purchaser and off-taker of power.
Although the area may be rich in solar resources, it seems incredibly unlikely the plant would produce “3,000MW” of power a month, as Informa appears to have mistakenly reported. The report did not name developer or module suppliers for the project, although it did suggest Antu Newen I will include 66,000 PV panels.
Neighbouring Chile has seen a great deal of interest in its potential for solar turn into almost 500MW of deployment by 2014 and forecast to hit 1GW this year. Meanwhile, the wider Latin America region is growing in its importance to the global PV industry, with an overall 352% increase in installations expected in 2015 over last year, yet Argentina has been less quick to catch on. A March 2013 blog for PV Tech described a lack of access to finance as the biggest barrier facing the sector at the time.
In November 2014, PV Tech reported that only the country’s second utility-scale PV plant had been completed and connected, a 1MW project in the San Luis province. Additionally, equipment and technology specialist Schmid committed to building a PV production facility in the country that same month.