Spanish utility Iberdrola and tech giant Amazon have signed a 476MW renewables power purchase agreement (PPA) in Portugal and Spain.
212MW of the purchased capacity will be solar PV. This will be from the Ciudad Rodrigo solar PV plant in Salamanca, western Spain. It also marks the first solar PV PPA between Amazon and Iberdrola; they have previously signed several PPAs in the US, the UK and Germany, all for wind power.
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The solar plant will represent an investment of nearly €200 million (US$205 million) and is currently under construction. Once operational, the project will have an installed capacity of 318MWp.
“With Iberdrola’s extensive global portfolio of renewables, we are continually seeking to expand such partnerships, to accelerate decarbonisation and support businesses in reaching their climate goals.
“Additionally, the AI technology that AWS [Amazon Web Service] is helping to integrate into our business is already delivering tangible results in terms of enabling our renewable energy assets to be even more efficient and helping the smart grid networks that we operate to be even more flexible and reliable,” said Aitor Moso Raigoso, executive vice president customer business at Iberdrola.
The partnership between Iberdrola and Amazon will see the utility use AWS’ high performance computing (HPC) to improve weather forecasting simulations performance across its wind farms globally.
Amazon leading global renewables corporate offtakes
The European PPA market in 2024 has been defined by falling prices, political uncertainty and growing corporate demand, as reported by two recent reports from LevelTen and Pexapark.
In its Renewables Market Outlook 2025 report, Pexapark highlighted Iberdrola as the top seller in European PPAs for a second consecutive year, according to the Spanish utility.
Moreover, Amazon is among the world’s largest corporate power buyers; it ranked first in European solar and wind PPAs contracted in 2023. The company has had the fastest growth in contracting solar power in the US and is overall only second after fellow big tech giant Meta.
Until the end of the first quarter of 2024, Amazon contracted 4.7GW of capacity in the US compared with Meta’s 5.2GW. However, Amazon has had a much faster growth between 2023 and Q1 2024 with 3.6GW of capacity contracted during that time, more than double Meta’s numbers.
