Russian wholesale electricity market administrator JSC ATS has allocated 775MW of solar PV in the country’s eighth auction round for large-scale renewables, with solar recording a lowest price of ₽4.33/kWh (US$0.05/kWh).
JSC ATS reviewed 89 solar plants, 100 wind power projects and three hydropower proposals. The auction’s average price stood at ₽5.18/kWh (US$0.071/kWh).
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Chosen solar projects, which are expected to become operational in 2023 and 2024, ranged from planned capacities of 8.5MW to 60MW.
Domestic solar player Unigreen Power secured the largest share of the tender with 545MW spread across ten separate projects, with Retail Solar LLC winning 133MW and New Energy LLC securing 96.36MW of the auction.
Unigreen professes to have almost 700MW of operational solar assets across Europe, Russia and the CIS region and a further pipeline of 2GW. The company is owned by Ream Management LLC, which is also the majority owner of heterojunction (HJ) module specialist Hevel. Earlier this summer Unigreen broke ground on a 1.3GW HJ ingot and wafering facility which will also produce 1GW of HJ cells in Kaliningrad.
In addition to solar, the auction also saw 1,851MW awarded to wind power and 96MW to hydroelectric. Wind bids ranged from ₽1,717/MWh (US$23.65/MWh) to ₽5,100/MWh (US$70.3/MWh).
Russia had around 1.5GW of installed solar by the end of last year while it continues to sink money into fossil fuel projects.
Recently, oil and gas company Lukoil commissioned a 20MW PV plant that features HJ modules from module and cell manufacturer Hevel Solar, which has also just completed Russia’s “first” off-grid hybrid PV plant in the Russian Arctic.
PV Tech publisher Solar Media travels to Poland in November to host the maiden Large Scale Solar Central & Eastern Europe (LSS CEE) conference. Held in Warsaw, the event will bring together investors, developers and EPCs from the European solar community. More details on the event, including how to attend, can be found here.