Electric utility and renewable energy company Energias de Portugal (EDP) plans to invest €2.5 billion over the next three years to install an additional 4GW of distributed solar capacity around the world.
EDP currently boasts a portfolio of 1.6GW of distributed solar capacity in both business and residential sectors, and is eager to expand its solar portfolio. The company’s solar capacity accounts for just 8% of its total renewable capacity, compared to the group’s wind portfolio that accounts for 59% of its installed capacity, and new investments in distributed solar will help to address this imbalance.
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“Solar distributed generation represents a tremendous opportunity to accelerate the energy transition alongside our clients,” said EDP CEO Miguel Stilwell d’Andrade. “This business segment can efficiently provide significant energy cost savings for our clients as it entails shorter permitting and development times and faster payback as compared to the larger utility scale renewables projects, while also addressing our clients’ growing energy independence aspirations.”
While d’Andrade described a partnership with “thousands of companies and families” to build the new distributed solar capacity, neither he nor EDP specified where the new projects would be built, or over what timeframe they could come online. However, the news fits the company’s recent plans to dramatically expand its solar operations worldwide, with 9.4GW of new solar projects in its pipeline in the Americas, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
Indeed, EDP plans to expand its European distributed solar capacity by five times between 2023 and 2026, and three times in its Asia-Pacific portfolio over the same period.
While distributed solar is unlikely to be the dominant part of the global solar industry, it is a growing component of the sector. According to forecasts from the International Energy Agency, the world could add 121GW of residential and off-grid solar capacity between 2019 and 2024, up from 39GW of new additions in these sectors between 2012 and 2018.
In these scenarios, the percentage of distributed solar in the world’s total solar capacity would increase from 36% by the end of 2018 to 46% by the end of 2024.
The news follows EDP’s receipt of approval from the Chilean government to build 323MW of new renewable power projects in the commune of Taltal.